Cyber situational awareness (CSA) is a prerequisite for justified decision making and to maintain cyber security. This becomes particularly complex when establishing inter-organizational awareness across sectors. For example, CERTs and national cyber security centers need to establish CSA within countries when coordinating regional cyber incident response. Today’s state of the art of information sharing across larger numbers of organizations is often still the least common denominator in the shape of web-based forms and email reports. These are easily applicable by almost everyone who wants to report findings even in stressful situations. However, these do not prove to be efficient for the coordinator that aggregates and merges the data. Therefore, a cyber coordination platform using online surveys is proposed. This approach uses surveys to collect, aggregate and visualizes data in a dashboard to support cyber coordination and knowledge management. Furthermore, the online surveys are easy to use and respond to and therefore simplify the participation of stakeholders. We propose an architecture and implemented a prototype using popular web application frameworks. The evaluation in a user study revealed promising results with respect to increased efficiency and decreased resource requirements for establishing situational awareness.

Top