Situational awareness gaps and opportunities for cyber security

Security practitioners feel the need to improve cyber situational awareness (SA), but capabilities and assessments have not been matched. SA is an essential component of cyber security for everyone, from individuals to companies, response teams and threat exchange. In this field note, we highlight existing research and our field observations, a recent review of cyber security research literature, and call on the research community to help address three research challenges in situational awareness for cyber security. Gaps suggest the need to (1) understand what cyber is - SA from the perspective of human operators, and then (2) measure it so that (3) the community can know if SA has meaningful pathways to cyber security and if methods, technology, or other solutions are used would improve SA and thus improve would these results.