Something I thought about a while back to get even with my evil neighbours was cloning their social networks (now ex-neighbours thanks to a protracted campaign, but that is another story). In the initial collection phase to map the "battlespace" I found that the majority of the members of their house had myspace profiles. I was going to duplicate their personal networks on another well known social networking site - Bebo - and try put them in conflict through provocation with members on that site that lived within the greater metropolitan area and had known aggressive criminal tendencies (offending information I collected open source through local court proceedings and local papers).
This little imitative communications deception endeavour never transpired because my ethically-minded plan of legal and other measures came through in the end (if anyone is interested Saul Alinksy's book "Rules for Radicals" was something I took solace in, and would recommend to anyone planning on any non-kinetic peaceful action).
The reason I bring up the above story is because there is a recent GNUCitizen blog post talking about "Social Network Evil Twin Attacks". It is quite similar to the plan I intended and something I reckon that'll end up becoming more frequent with identity theft, netwar and other concepts coming together. A good quote from the blog post:
"The hack here is not technical but rather psychological. Remember, hacking is the action of outsmarting the others and as such it may take any form. Fooling people’s believes is an important craft that have been with us since the dawn of humanity, yet we often fail to acknowledge it effectiveness. These are what Evil Twin attack are all about. From WiFi security prospective the evil twin is the rogue access point that pretends to be a friendly network. From the social networks point of view, the evil twin is a hacker or a bot masking himself as the real person."
8 comments:
Nice Post,
A textbook lesson from the school of dirty tricks that leans toward proto-5GW.
I wonder about the possible defenses against this. You would almost have to preempt this type of attack by controlling all possible potential appearances of your self/organization in any type of media or venue.
Basically you would have to copyright your self so you had some sort of recourse.
Very interesting.
Hey arherring, it's early morning here, can't sleep.
Anyway ... yeah it is very interesting. Something else I thought about a while back was for a generational shift in war to happen, in the dialectical sense, usually there is an undermining of the current generations strengths. The new generational outfit finds weaknesses in what were strengths. One example is the shift from 1gw to 2gw. 2gw exploited 1gw strengths (massed manpower) with massed firepower.
So, my point ... There is a lot of talk about connectivity and resilience, especially in terms of networks. I've always thought of netwar, and loss cells of networks as a facet of 4gw, so I think a *possible* generational shift towards 5gw would be undermining the strengths of networks like connectivity and resilience. One such facet that *may* undermine networks is the duplication of virtual networks with synthetic identity theft.
I would say one such defence is for there to be no network at all. Limit connectivity between your nodes, or if there is connectivity, come up with some deception plans to cover up the connections, or, create so many different nodes that are similar to yourself but different personalities (like create a gay munzenberg, or a famous explorer munzenberg, or a female munzenberg), that the attacker doesn't know which is the real one.
The copyright idea is probably a good one too. It'll be interesting to watch the battles between lawyers involved in copyright cases against anonymous hordes on the net to see if it stands up though.
Munz, I think you're right on.
From a 5GW standpoint, the theorists seem to mostly agree that it would be standard 5GW doctrine use proxies and other methods of concealmentso that your network would be effectively insulated and unobservable except by the results of your actions (hence appearing as conspiracy theories). On the flip side the organization's actions would be to co-opt a target's networks in order to use them against the target, either to manipulate them in order to affect a specific response or use them as vectors for memetic manipulation.
To the 5gw mobile!
Damn, but you're a conniving sort when miffed, eh Munz?!
Great discussion and the commentary at GNUCitizen was interesting. Too bad it rolled a bit off topic.
But the aspect of creating enough "selves" to mitigate such a threat is arduous.
Arherring, good stuff, the effect of co-opting a target's network is very much akin to affecting the first "O" in the OODA. In essence, effect how the target observes as opposed to how they orient (4GW.)
Hey soob, I think anyone would be miffed if you had a neighbour who kicked down your fence (then claimed they were leaning on it) and also would break glass on your cement outside your house so you could no longer wear shoes!
But yeah, they were real arseholes, shame too, because they were the type of arseholes that had I gone round there and beat them to a pulp they would have gone screaming to the police. I imagine you know the type I'm talking about. They are all talk and bullying up to a point. Anyway, I fought them on a level they couldn't fight at and won, so I'm pretty pleased about it.
Yeah, hopefully there will be more posts on the topic at GNUCitizen to make up for it.
This is interesting.
I read about a girl who committed suicide because neighborhood tormentors created a profile of a fake boy that befriended, then turned on her. Tragic. [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_collins]
Today I read that a Moroccan court sentenced a man to a 3-year prison sentence for creating a fake facebook profile of a Moroccan prince. [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/world/africa/23briefs-PRISONFORFAC_BRF.html
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