RiskUKApril2017

The Security Institute’s View
claiming that Germany’s oldest church had
been burned down by a mob of 1,000 Muslims.
In a report on Russian information warfare
published last year, Lucas and Pomerantsev
observe how the nature of online media, and
especially social media, allows propagandists
to play to audiences who are already
mistrustful of their own systems and seeking
information that confirms their biases,
identifying and exploiting ‘echo chambers’
where facts and fact-checkers have little effect.
Here in the UK, concern is building among
privacy campaigners and watchdogs about the
use of Big Data analytics for profiling citizens,
including for political purposes. Reports on the
strategy used by US data mining company
Cambridge Analytica as part of the presidential
campaign of Donald Trump and the referendum
campaign of Leave.eu give an insight into how
political messages can be tailored to individual
social media users through the data analytics
of online activity. This is likely to become a
common feature of political campaigning in the
future. As a society, we need to do more to
ensure that appropriate data protection
principles and safeguards are in place to keep
up with such technological advances.
Governments also need to take account of
the related problem that the credibility of
established media outlets such as the BBC is
increasingly being questioned and perhaps
actively compromised by wider political forces.
If this situation intensifies, where are we to turn
for trustworthy reports of incidents or events
that impact on our security?
Much of the responsibility for this rests with
politicians, as has been seen in the US, with the
risk of such behaviour spreading across our
own political system. We’re increasingly seeing
the label ‘fake news’ being misapplied to the
mainstream press in order to suit political
agendas. In the US, such efforts to undermine
the media recently extended to the exclusion of
news organisations like CNN and the BBC from
a White House press conference.
While it may be tempting for politicians to
exclaim ‘fake news’ in response to criticism,
this sets a dangerous precedent. Journalists
and editors need to protect their interests – as
well as the national interest – by proactively
challenging such misuses of the phrase.
Dealing with a crisis
In a recent article in Politico Magazine, the
point was made that President Trump’s alleged
attempts to discredit the press and scientific
community could later serve to undermine his
administration’s capability to deal with a major
crisis. Events such as the Ebola crisis require
evidence-based understandings of the
problems at hand, trust between partners
involved in responding to the crisis and
effective public information campaigns
orchestrated to communicate risk information
and advice to the public. If such elements are
lacking then the crisis response will inevitably
be seriously impaired.
Propaganda and disinformation themselves
belong on the registers of major risks to
national Governments and corporations as
threats to their strategic objectives, reputation
and continuity of operations. These activities
may undermine democratic systems or stir up
community sentiment on an issue to such a
degree that it boils over into civil disorder, and
so need to be included in emergency
preparedness strategies of scenario planning
and exercising. One of the underpinning
features of a crisis is the erosion of the
infrastructure (ie power, telecommunications
and transportation systems) on which a
response strategy is dependent. If trust in
public information is undermined, the capacity
to make judgements is equally impaired.
In the corporate world, the brand is often an
organisation’s biggest asset. Misinformation
presents significant reputational risks and may
be employed by competitors or cyber criminals
seeking to gain stock market advantages. Back
in 2013, a hacker posted a bogus tweet by the
Associated Press about an explosion at the
White House which led to over £90 billion being
temporarily erased from the US stock market.
Companies are typically alerted after the fact
when share prices are already moving. A recent
report produced by BrandProtect and The
Ponemon Institute concludes that the threats
posed to companies by online incidents and
cyber attacks falling outside of the traditional
corporate security perimeter are high, yet the
capabilities to mitigate them are low.
‘Fake news’ presents a further threat to
companies and individuals as a tool for social
engineering, itself a significant dimension of
cyber crime as discussed by James Scott in a
report for the Institute of Critical Infrastructure
Technology. This type of threat sees both ‘fake
news’ and real news being ‘weaponised’, with
trending stories and sensational headlines
being used to draw people’s attention. Lures
range from the very basic to the highly tailored,
based on individuals’ social media activity.
Dr Alison Wakefield FSyI:
Vice-Chairman of The Security
Institute and Senior Lecturer in
Security Risk Management at
the University of Portsmouth
“Much of what’s currently being framed as ‘fake news’ is
in fact deliberate propaganda and disinformation that
needs to be recognised and labelled as such”
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