Florida State University Offers Faculty Expert on Cybersecurity Threats

Newswise — Shuyuan Mary Ho, an assistant professor at Florida State University’s School of Information, is available for media questions and analysis on cybersecurity threats, including the recent breach by Russian criminals who stole more than 1.2 billion Internet usernames and passwords. Ho’s research focuses on trusted human-computer interactions, specifically addressing issues of cyber insider threats and online identity theft. Ho’s theory of trustworthiness attribution integrates social psychologies on trust and attribution, for insider threat detection as supported by cyber infrastructure. She further develops the framework for a dyadic attribution model to assess human trustworthiness in sophisticated online communication environments. Ho designs online games as an experiment protocol for investigating human deception and betrayal in virtual organizations. Ho’s socio-technical research approach utilizes social-psychological theories along with pragmatic viewpoints on language cues to create an innovative methodology for computational modeling of next generation behavioral inference systems based on language-action features in complex trust relationships, human disposition and intent detection. “Cybersecurity becomes more complex as the interaction between humans and technology advances. Information is precious but requires a very sophisticated approach to protect against misusers. It’s not possible to create a vault to lock down information like we protect gold in the bank. Once classified information is revealed and copied, it is forever compromised.”