Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

DESIGNING COMMON KNOWLEDGE: INFLUENCING A SOCIAL NETWORK177snowball effect of transitive trust, and the expertise of its operator allowed “Robin Sage” toinfiltrate the American DoD (Department of Defense) information security community—allowing her access to unpublished technical papers and even some tactical information.Likewise, an alternative tactic of impersonating a high-ranking official may also lead to manyfriendship requests—particularly if the attacker knows whom he or she is targeting. However,the time window to harvest information using such a technique will likely be muchshorter as opposed to using a “Robin Sage.”DESIGNING COMMON KNOWLEDGE: INFLUENCINGA SOCIAL NETWORKIn early 2011, the “Arab Spring” spread to Syria. In particular, large portions of the SunniIslam populace was rebelling against the Shiite-dominated government. As with many of theincidents during the “Arab Spring,” social media was used extensively. With the effectivenessof social media is spreading a message and allowing international diasporas to provide moraland informational support, how can an entity (i.e., a state) influence the social network of agroup of revolutionaries and perhaps reverse some of their progress on the propagandafront? This may have been the very question many supporters of the Syrian regime askedthemselves.In mid-2011, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) emerged—a pro-Syrian regime hacktivistgroup, which became prominent in public media for a series of various attacks against therevolutionaries. This group is believed to have a connection with the Syrian Computer Society,a group led by now current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the 1990s. 17 Noting theeffective use of social media by the revolutionaries, the SEA set out to limit its value.How the Syrian Electronic Army Attacked Rivals on FacebookThe SEA worked to target the social media site Facebook—which is the dominant generalpublic social networking site at the time of this writing. One technique that the SEA usedagainst Facebook was spamming. Often the focus was on popular or political Facebook pages.Once the target page was selected, in the course of 1 or 2 h, large numbers of comments wereposted to these pages. 18 Hence, the volume of bogus messages would have the effect of makingthe targeted page unusable to the originally intended social group.The SEA also used more technical means to attack the online social networks of the revolutionaries.Using various Twitter accounts, the SEA sent out links to a “fascinating video clipshowing an attack on the Syrian Regime” which directed them to a fake Facebook login page.A follow-on Tweet informed the victim that he or she might be asked to log on to Facebook asecond time as an “additional security measure.” 19 If the victim clicked on the link, the firstFacebook page would harvest the user name and password, sending this information to theSEA. The second page would actually log them into Facebook.While this may seem like a transparent ploy, one must consider the real-world context ofInternet usage in Syria. As of 2010, less than 18% of the population was online, 20 and the countryof 22 million had only 420 hosts on the Internet—ranked 187 worldwide (a lower ranking