What is Cassandra

If people are the “weakest link” in cybersecurity because of their psychological make-up and hardwiring—their socialized desire to trust and cooperate with others, their cognitive biases and misperceptions, their preferences for convenience, their general going with System 1 inattention instead of System 2 attention and thinking—this begs the question of whether the same micro-scale cognitive limits found in individual users are also present on a mass scale. After all, there have been discovered problematic unthinking leanings in group decision making: obedience to authority, bystander effects, groupthink, and the Abilene paradox, among others. Using a range of often mass-scale data sources and data analytics tools, research questions were asked around three areas: (1) the level of sophistication of the cybersecurity electronic hive mind towards cybersecurity issues, (2) the gap between the non-expert members and the expert members in the hive mind, and (3) whether the extant hive mind was more reflective of mob unthinkingness or deliberation and wisdom.