Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12810v1
• Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:04:56 GMT
• Title: Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners
• Abstract summary: We take an early step at understanding military cybersecurity by investigating how service members understand, recognize, and respond to cyber risk.<n>We find that cybersecurity is organizationally abstract on ships, so mariners build cyber risk models from informal experience rather than formal instruction.<n>These findings inform actionable recommendations to help military operators frame cyber threats, merge longstanding nautical doctrine with modern systems, and apply military insights to the civilian sector.
• Score: 9.444923237860186
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Cyberwarfare has become a key component of contemporary geopolitical conflict. However, there has been extremely limited systematic investigation into how cybersecurity is handled by military organizations and personnel. The military context is unique compared to other operational ones, with immense resource availability (U.S. military spending approached 1 trillion dollars in 2024), a rigid chain of command, and extraordinary consequences for its actions. Thus, military cybersecurity is a distinct yet understudied topic. In this paper, we take an early step at understanding military cybersecurity by investigating how service members understand, recognize, and respond to cyber risk. We focus on maritime services and carefully consider organizational barriers to design an unclassified study and conduct semi-structured interviews with 20 military mariners from U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels. Through our investigation, we identify unique consequences of compromising military systems, including weapon takeover and purposeful geopolitical escalation. We find that cybersecurity is organizationally abstract on ships, so mariners build cyber risk models from informal experience rather than formal instruction. They nonetheless make cybersecurity actionable by recognizing operational impacts and responding with a safety-oriented incident-response model that creates resilience but may delay cyber attribution and containment. These findings inform actionable recommendations to help military operators frame cyber threats, merge longstanding nautical doctrine with modern systems, and apply military insights to the civilian sector, all to secure the broader maritime environment.

Related papers

• An Unsupervised Learning Approach For A Reliable Profiling Of Cyber Threat Actors Reported Globally Based On Complete Contextual Information Of Cyber Attacks [0.0]
  It is critical to promptly recognize cyberattacks and establish strong defense mechanisms against them.<n>Creating a profile of cyber threat actors based on their traits or patterns of behavior can help to create effective defenses against cyberattacks in advance.<n>In this paper, an unsupervised efficient agglomerative hierarchal clustering technique is proposed for profiling cybercriminal groups.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-09-15T08:32:59Z)
• A Sea of Cyber Threats: Maritime Cybersecurity from the Perspective of Mariners [11.0069835329933]
  Maritime systems, including ships and ports, are critical components of global infrastructure.<n>Recent attacks disrupting Maersk, one of the world's largest shipping companies, caused widespread impacts on international trade.<n>Despite the sector's importance, maritime cybersecurity remains underexplored, leaving significant gaps in understanding its challenges and risks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-18T19:45:35Z)
• CyberGym: Evaluating AI Agents' Real-World Cybersecurity Capabilities at Scale [45.97598662617568]
  We introduce CyberGym, a large-scale benchmark featuring 1,507 real-world vulnerabilities across 188 software projects.<n>We show that CyberGym leads to the discovery of 35 zero-day vulnerabilities and 17 historically incomplete patches.<n>These results underscore that CyberGym is not only a robust benchmark for measuring AI's progress in cybersecurity but also a platform for creating direct, real-world security impact.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-03T07:35:14Z)
• Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-Base-8B Technical Report [50.268821168513654]
  We present Foundation-Sec-8B, a cybersecurity-focused large language model (LLMs) built on the Llama 3.1 architecture.<n>We evaluate it across both established and new cybersecurity benchmarks, showing that it matches Llama 3.1-70B and GPT-4o-mini in certain cybersecurity-specific tasks.<n>By releasing our model to the public, we aim to accelerate progress and adoption of AI-driven tools in both public and private cybersecurity contexts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-28T08:41:12Z)
• AI threats to national security can be countered through an incident regime [55.2480439325792]
  We propose a legally mandated post-deployment AI incident regime that aims to counter potential national security threats from AI systems.<n>Our proposed AI incident regime is split into three phases. The first phase revolves around a novel operationalization of what counts as an 'AI incident'<n>The second and third phases spell out that AI providers should notify a government agency about incidents, and that the government agency should be involved in amending AI providers' security and safety procedures.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-03-25T17:51:50Z)
• Towards Type Agnostic Cyber Defense Agents [0.0]
  Cyber threats have continued to grow, leading to labor shortages and a skills gap in cybersecurity.<n>Many cybersecurity product vendors and security organizations have looked to artificial intelligence to shore up their defenses.<n>This work considers how to characterize attackers and defenders in one approach to the automation of cyber defense.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-02T14:32:18Z)
• Maritime Cybersecurity: A Comprehensive Review [8.406766604243163]
  Maritime cybersecurity refers to the protection of computer systems and digital assests within the maritime industry. In this survey, we aim to identify the significant domains of maritime cybersecurity and measure their effectiveness. A multi-dimensional taxonomy of maritime cyber attacks is presented, offering insights into threat actors, motivations, and impacts. We have evaluated various security solutions, from integrated solutions to component specific solutions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-09T07:30:48Z)
• Cyber Sentinel: Exploring Conversational Agents in Streamlining Security Tasks with GPT-4 [0.08192907805418582]
  This paper introduces Cyber Sentinel, an innovative task-oriented cybersecurity dialogue system. It embodies the fusion of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity domain expertise, and real-time data analysis to combat the multifaceted challenges posed by cyber adversaries. Our work is a novel approach to task-oriented dialogue systems, leveraging the power of chaining GPT-4 models combined with prompt engineering.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-09-28T13:18:33Z)
• Graph Mining for Cybersecurity: A Survey [61.505995908021525]
  The explosive growth of cyber attacks nowadays, such as malware, spam, and intrusions, caused severe consequences on society. Traditional Machine Learning (ML) based methods are extensively used in detecting cyber threats, but they hardly model the correlations between real-world cyber entities. With the proliferation of graph mining techniques, many researchers investigated these techniques for capturing correlations between cyber entities and achieving high performance.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-04-02T08:43:03Z)
• A System for Efficiently Hunting for Cyber Threats in Computer Systems Using Threat Intelligence [78.23170229258162]
  We build ThreatRaptor, a system that facilitates cyber threat hunting in computer systems using OSCTI. ThreatRaptor provides (1) an unsupervised, light-weight, and accurate NLP pipeline that extracts structured threat behaviors from unstructured OSCTI text, (2) a concise and expressive domain-specific query language, TBQL, to hunt for malicious system activities, and (3) a query synthesis mechanism that automatically synthesizes a TBQL query from the extracted threat behaviors.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-01-17T19:44:09Z)
• Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Defense Methods in the Cyber Security Domain [58.30296637276011]
  This paper summarizes the latest research on adversarial attacks against security solutions based on machine learning techniques. It is the first to discuss the unique challenges of implementing end-to-end adversarial attacks in the cyber security domain.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-07-05T18:22:40Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.