WASHINGTON, Nov. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — The weaponization of digital vectors for a more expedient and potent manner of message delivery has become a pandemic as nation-states use technological means to streamline distribution of fake news, propaganda and other ill-intended content. National Security now depends more on winning the hearts and minds of a population than it does on kinetic warfare. With the hyper-evolution of cyberspace and technology, we have become a world less divided by geographical borders and more divided by ideological variation. Few things are certain in the emerging cyber-kinetic-meta-war; however, one absolute is that dragnet surveillance capitalism, formerly a privacy issue, has metastasized into a national security epidemic.  The delivery of objective, non-partisan research, and advisory to key decision makers is vital to opposing these sophisticated multi-vector operations. 

In direct response to this new threat, and to advance federal stakeholder understanding of how nation states such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are weaponizing cyberspace in order to inject their influence operations on the American and European populations, the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) has introduced the Center for Cyber-Influence Operations Studies (CCIOS).  As America’s Non-Partisan Cybersecurity Think-Tank, ICIT and select pivotal partners are uniquely positioned to bolster America and our allies’ resistance to malicious influence operations by holding regular briefings and publishing research that exposes foreign actors’ tools, techniques, and procedures.  Some of the topics which will be explored by CCIOS include the digital applications of:

• Information warfare and other forms of digitized propaganda [nation state, special interest groups]
• Psychological warfare
• Political warfare
• Other forms of perception steering

At this moment, armies of malicious, A.I. driven bots are leveraging machine-learning algorithms to polarize and provoke both sides of political, societal, and ideological debates by inflating an illusory faux-virility to widen geopolitical and socio-economical divides, to destabilize democratic institutions, and to weaken national security. Adversaries are influencing populations through the distribution of polarizing propaganda, the conflation of real and fake news, and the artificial inflation of ideological divides.  Radical extremists of various ideologies are employing open-source machine-learning and artificial-intelligence solutions to expedite “wound-collector” recruitment, to psychologically pray on vulnerable populations, to fan the flames of illusory ideological divisions, and to evade law enforcement.

Without a quantum-renaissance in the study and delivery of research into influence operations, America has limited chances of thwarting resourced and sophisticated information warfare attacks from adversaries such as Russia and China.  CCIOS research will be hyper-focused on all facets of information warfare, the weaponization of psychographic and demographic information, influence campaigns, and propaganda studies exclusive to digital weaponization.  Federal Agencies and Congressional offices interested in being notified for briefings, research and other CCIOS news should contact ICIT for more information.

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SOURCE Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology