The study will also explore new personalised approaches to encourage more secure human behaviours and their impacts on individuals, organisations and society as a whole.

A new study being led by the University of Surrey will see academics exploring how best to tackle the future threats of cyber security and cyber crime, focusing on how to better understand and influence behaviours of cyber criminals, victims, people who operate cyber security systems, business and governmental bodies. The project will involve 12 cyber crime and cyber security experts from across the world, as well as governmental (especially law enforcement) agencies, industry (cyber security companies) and NGOs, and will use real-world scenarios to investigate how personalised approaches can help people and organisations better to reduce human-related risks and fight against cyber crime.

The overall aim of the project is to develop a framework to analyse the behaviours of a range of stakeholders in the cyber security and cyber crime ecosystems including criminals, victims, people who operate cybersecurity systems and define policies, business and governmental organisations such as law enforcement. It will also produce better knowledge about human behaviours that leave companies and individual users vulnerable to cyber attacks/cyber crimes, as well as software tools for capturing, analysing, influencing and evaluating those behaviours to reduce such risks. Since the nature of the threat evolves as the technological background develops and criminals and security personnel continually adapt to each other’s countermeasures, the project will adopt an explicitly evolutionary approach drawing on perspectives ranging from biological to military arms races.

The Surrey-led research project is entitled “Addressing Cyber security and Cyber crime via a co-Evolutionary approach to reducing human-related risks”, and will be coordinated by the University of Surrey as the lead institute. It will involve a group of researchers working in five academic disciplines (Computer Science, Crime Science, Business, Engineering, Behavioural Science) at four UK research institutes (University of Surrey, UCL, University of Warwick, and TRL). The project has an overall budget of £1.1m, with 80% (£881k) funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), is expected to start in April 2017 and will last for two years.

The new framework and solutions it will identify will contribute towards enhanced safety in the cyber-physical world for many different kinds of users such as citizens, employees, business managers, policy and law makers, governments, and industry. The project will apply the developed framework to two selected real-world use cases, which are expected to be human-related cyber risks within global transaction and exchange networks and those within hybrid transportation networks involving key cyber elements such as connected vehicles. Uniquely, the project will be within a ‘sandbox’ of a live environment, with individuals having their own personal data store, enabled by the HAT ecosystem. The project will be joining the HAT Community Foundation to provision HATs, facilitated by the University of Warwick.