Socialbots and the Challenges of Cyberspace Awareness

As security communities brace for the emerging social automation based threats, we examine the mechanisms of developing situation awareness in cyberspace and the governance issues that socialbots bring into this existing paradigm of cyber situation awareness. We point out that an organisation's situation awareness in cyberspace is a phenomena fundamentally distinct from the original conception of situation awareness, requiring continuous data exchange and knowledge management where the standard implementation mechanisms require significant policy attention in light of threats like malicious social automation. We conceptualise Cyberspace Awareness as a socio-technical phenomena with Syntactic, Semantic, and Operatic dimensions - each subject to a number of stressors which are exacerbated under social automation based threats. The paper contributes to the ideas of situational awareness in cyberspace, and characterises the challenges therein around tackling the increasingly social and often pervasive, automation in cyber threat environments.