Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING181As we have seen in previous chapters, social media on the Internet can have a great impactin a civil conflict as it allows a group with limited resources to produce a message heard by theglobal community. As a result, an opposing group (i.e., an existing regime) shall seek to limitthe effects of a social media-driven information operations campaign through a variety ofmeans. Using social engineering techniques to exploit Facebook accounts, for example, is alreadybeing looked at by groups such as the SEA to limit the effects of social media. Further,the linkages among user accounts in such sites form a complex social network, which often issusceptible to the spread of ideas through cascades. This fact may indicate that in the nearfuture techniques to influence large portions of an online user community in a propagandacampaign may appear in a conflict.SUMMARYOnline social media has ushered in a new age of how information is managed in conflictsituations. These information operations can both support or be supported by cyber warfare.We saw with the “Robin Sage” and the Facebook imposters that cyber warriors can leveragethe trust relationships of such sites in order to obtain the sensitive information that can lead tocyber exploitation and espionage operations. On the other side, groups such as the SEA leveragecyber-warfare techniques to hack into user accounts of online social networks in aneffort to destroy the credibility of an adversary. Finally, in the future, such techniques maybe used with tools from the study of complex networks in an attempt to influence large portionsof an online user community during a conflict.SUGGESTED FURTHER READINGThe Robin Sage experiment is outlined in Thomas Ryan’s paper “Getting in Bed with RobinSage” which was also presented at the BlackHat conference in 2010. BlackHat is one of thepremier hacker conferences. The actions of the Syrian Electronic Army were described bythe Information Warfare Monitor group in a paper entitled “The Emergence of Open andOrganized Pro-Government Cyber Attacks in the Middle East: The Case of the Syrian ElectronicArmy” which is available on the Information Warfare Monitor Web site (http://www.infowar-monitor.net/2011/08/fake-facebook-page-targets-pro-revolution-syrian-users/).Further information about common hacking techniques used to illicitly obtain access into auser’s Facebook or Twitter account are described in the book Hacking: The Next Generationby Nitesh Dhanjani, Billy Rios, and Brett Hardin. This book also includes accounts of howmany commercial Web-based email applications can be hacked—specifically noting how2008 vice-presidential candidate’s Sarah Palin’s email account was compromised duringher campaign. Incidentally, some of Palin’s personal communications were posted on 4chan’sb-board, the significance of which is described in Chapter 6.The study of complex social networks is a new and exciting emerging field of science combiningtechniques from computer science, sociology, physics, mathematics, economics, andbiology. For an introduction to this exciting new field, we recommend Networks, Crowds,and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg.