
Military Leaders Are Starting to Freak Out Over Russia’s Info Warfare Dominance - supercanuck
https://taskandpurpose.com/russia-information-war/
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random_upvoter
What worries me more than a bunch of trolls in Moscow is this fashionable
belief in the West that democracy cannot work because people are idiots whose
vote can be turned by a meme on Facebook. If people didn't vote for your
party, it's because people were not attracted by your party, mkay?

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craftyguy
> fashionable belief in the West that democracy cannot work because people are
> idiots whose vote can be turned by a meme on Facebook.

Eh, it's more than people are suseptible to confirmation bias, and the meme
ads on facebook re-enforce the beliefs imparted upon them by <insert preferred
single "news" source here>.

> If people didn't vote for your party, it's because people were not attracted
> by your party, mkay?

May the most entertaining party win!

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awkim
"Put simply, Russia seems to be playing chess, while the U.S. is trying to
figure out how to set up the board to play checkers."

This doesn't surprise me as they need to play on an asymmetrical board.

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Tempest1981
Meanwhile, the US government is pushing toward cloud computing. I hope they
know how to make it secure.

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acct1771
They don't. That's why they're passing the buck to someone who can.

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baybal2
And what so? Western countries are free democracies that don't spend 1 billion
buck a year on propaganda, sedition, sabotage and subversion.

The West has no need to resort to underhanded tricks, and should not resort to
a mirror version of Russian information warfare.

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throwaway8879
That's how you lose a war, whether it be a conventional one or a geopolitical
one.

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baybal2
People with moral integrity win wars against ones without, will keyboard
warriors stand the ground when confronted by an enemy paratrooper pointing a
rifle on them, or will they prostrate and beg mercy saying "I only edited
articles"...

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drosan
It doesn't work like that btw :D

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chriselles
Truth was an effective weapon in the Cold War.

Fake news seems to be effective in Cold War 2.

Hopefully the efficacy of truth outweighs fake news moving forward.

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craftyguy
'fake news' really isn't a new creation. Propoganda was an effective weapon in
the Cold War, both world wars, and a staple of politics since, well, forever.

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elipsey
“The Russians are really good at this. Better than us"

I disagree. US LE and intelligence services are at least as good at subverting
the security of US information systems as Russians. State and local
governments have taken all practical and legal measures to make it worse for
my entire life by:

\--banning and nerfing crypto (from the old export ban to present),

\--hoarding vulnerabilities,

\--prosecuting whistle-blowers who threaten to embarrass large companies,

\--chilling research with vague and draconian hacking laws (CFAA),

\--turning an indifferent eye to dangerously invalid security assumptions
underlying telecom, payment systems, data brokers (cellular, ACH, CC/MCVISA,
Experian et. all)

\--and then getting into turf wars over who gets to exploit those defective
systems in secret...

...and just hoping no one outside our jurisdiction will notice.

The military has made mistakes like this too. Remember that time that they
used unencrypted video transmission for the MQ-9 predator drone? Someone
noticed.* The strategy that “the best defense is a good offense” is probably
not appropriate for information security.

Part of this is an economic problem as described, for example, by Schneier in
his recent Op-Ed. __There is little short term incentive for vendors to accept
the opportunity cost of building secure systems; if you can’t write it
yourself a parade of ethically questionable, bumbling contractors (HBGary?)
will sell you after the fact solutions.

Hopefully the US military takes it’s own operational security seriously enough
to keep soldiers from carrying off-the-shelf commercial cell phones, as the
Ukrainians reportedly did. Maybe this is harder than it sounds; it’s
apparently hard even to keep presidents from trying to do this. It appears
demonstrably unrealistic to expect that government personnel will remain
unaffected by the insecure systems used by unwashed masses of civilians. The
actual attacks discussed in the article are mostly against large scale public
infrastructure. The root of these problems is not really something you can
shoot at.

The article offers a number of quotes like the following, by Major General
Gedney: “It’s got to be operationalized down into a genuine multi-domain
battle.” I really have no idea what this means, but I sure hope it means
“instead of government agencies undermining civilian infosec and then using
the vulnerabilities to advance our parochial interests, let’s help the private
sector fix it, or at least get out of the way.”

* “In 2009, it was discovered that insurgents successfully intercepted video feeds from unmanned platforms using cheap software to exploit the use of unencrypted data links between the unmanned system and the ground control station.” RAND Corporation. 2014. ([https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR600/RR626/RAND_RR626.pdf))

 __‘Internet Hacking Is About to Get Much Worse’.
Schneier.[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/opinion/internet-
hacking-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/opinion/internet-hacking-
cybersecurity-iot.html)

