Exploring the Effects of “low and Slow” Cyber Attacks on Team Decision Making

This paper describes an experiment on the effects of low and slow cyber attacks on team decision making. Specifically, the study focuses on how targeted communications, disguised as originating from reliable sources, can be used to disseminate false information and instantiate biases in a team to disrupt normal decision-making processes. Using a team consensus task (the Life Event Stress Test), we manipulated the presence of a shared anchor (the disguised communication), and the presence of individual anchors. Our results indicated that, while teams were able to utilize their collaborative processes to reject the shared anchors, they were still susceptible to individual anchors. While only an introductory study with a limited sample size, the results contribute to both the cyber security and team decision-making literature. Implications for future research are also discussed.