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Political Information Warfare?

Rich September 26, 2008 No Comments

Over at the Washington Post they note that it looks like a “McCain Wins Debate” ad and quote accidently leaked before the… you know… debate actually happens. While I don’t plan on voting for him, criticizing preparing ads and responses ahead of time would be silly. It’s only prudent since there really isn’t time to create this content after the fact in our obsessive 24 hour news cycle driven society. What can be criticized is this could show a little lack of organization and discipline. Or not. If I were the Democratic equivalent of Karl Rove I might drop a few of these things on my own. Through front companies, of course. Sure, it would eventually be repudiated, but the initial damage will be done. Heck, that’s not even all that creative- aside from the ubiquitous YouTube ads and testimonials, there are all sorts of new attack vectors thanks to the Internet age. We already see plenty of this going on through email campaigns, which seem even more effective than the push polling of Bush II vs. McCain eight years ago. One reason this garbage is so effective? Most people have intense confirmation bias. As Adam posted recently, study after study shows we are inclined to believe that which aligns with our existing beliefs. On top of that, functional MRI studies have shown that political discussions trigger the same parts of the brain as religion- in other words, faith, and sections of our mind that are core to our identity. It is far easier to manipulate someone into believing what they want to believe than introducing contradictory information. The net is fracking perfect for this. Share:

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Friday Summary

Rich September 26, 2008 1 Comment

As most of you know, Adrian and I have been pretty slammed lately; bouncing all over the inter-tubes (and airports) on our quest to save freedom and not default on our mortgages. One thing we’ve been wanting to do for a while is summarize everything that’s been going on through the week in a bit more of a structured format, a la Rothman’s Daily Incite. But we’re not nearly as motivated as Mike, but we figure we can handle once a week before we attend the official Securosis Weekly Research Offsite (happy hour). It’s a summary of what we’ve been up to, and our top post selections for the week. Webcasts, Podcasts, and Conferences: I put together the DLP Security School for TechTarget a few weeks back, but it was published while I was in the middle of my travel binge. I really like this education format, and believe it or not there are a few tidbits in there that aren’t in all the other stuff I’ve published on DLP. Adrian just finished the SIM Security School. Did I mention we like this format? Unlike the DLP school he put together a full webcast (as opposed to a video segment) with a ton of content. I spoke on a data masking panel at Oracle World. Here’s a post inspired by the session. This week on the Network Security Podcast Episode 121 our guest was T-Rob discussing Palin’s email hack, and MQ middleware security. Yeah, we thought it was a weird combo too. Outside Writing: The big one for me this week was Macworld- I was heavily involved in the security issue that’s sitting on newsstands this month. Except where it’s sold out, like my neighborhood Barnes and Noble. (I swear I didn’t buy them all). I’m really proud of the issue- it addresses the security needs and questions of average users, and is the kind of thing I can send to my mom. Favorite Securosis Posts: Rich: The Breach Reporting Dilemma. We really need to start looking at breach reporting differently, but I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon. Adrian: Behavioral Modeling. Some of the most significant advances we can make in security are in heuristics, but it’s also an extremely difficult problem. Favorite Outside Posts: Adrian: Jeremiah Grossman on YouTube. (description) Rich: Tim Wilson on Premature Chasm Crossing. I love articles/posts on thinking differently about the security market and, oh, I don’t know, focusing on the end users. Top News: The economy. Is there any other news? Blog Comment of the Week: I don’t agree with all of them, but Dre has some of the deepest comments on the blog. Here’s one on our PCI scanning post: [snip]… Most organizations implement firewall/IPS incorrectly. They assume it’s something you plug in. Most firewalls/IPS don’t protect on the outbound, and most policies allow outbound SYN origination from the DMZ on externally facing interfaces. Most firewalls/IPS don’t provide the real protections one would need without excessive CPU and memory usage. A few null routes (or uRPF) at the border is all that is necessary to prevent traffic to the 80 percent of the Internet we know we can”t trust. …[/snip] We hope you all have a great weekend. Share:

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