Using Smart Glasses for Monitoring Cyber Threat Intelligence Feeds in a Multitasking Environment

The surge of COVID-19 has introduced a new threat surface as malevolent actors are trying to benefit from the pandemic. Because of this, new information sources and visualization tools about COVID-19 have been introduced into the workflow of frontline practitioners. As a result, analysts are increasingly required to shift their focus between different visual displays to monitor pandemic-related data, security threats, and incidents. Augmented reality (AR) smart glasses can overlay digital data to the physical environment in a comprehensible manner. However, the real-life use situations are often complex and require fast knowledge acquisition from multiple sources. In this study, we report results from a pilot and a trial where we used an overlaid AR information interface coupled with traditional computer monitors. Both the pilot and the study had six test subjects. Smart glasses and their applications often have a limited amount of adjustments for individual differences in physiology, which may influence task performance in fast-paced situations. Our goal was to evaluate a multi-tasking setup with traditional monitors and an AR headset where notifications from the new COVID-19 Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP) instance were visualized along with some interactability. Our results indicate some gender differences in some aspects of situational awareness. Some parts of the task load index also showed correlation with certain aspects of situational awareness. While our experiments were small scale, in this study, we showed that AR has the potential to improve situational awareness and task performance in monitoring tasks.