How will the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) impact cyber counterintelligence (CCI)?
Part II
...yes, there will be a distinction between those nations that are not ready to give up privacy and civil freedoms for increased security. ¿Does it seem coercive, neurotic, or too intense to handle?
Those governments who refuse to give up some degrees of privacy and civil freedoms will respond to attacks differently than their peers. The fear of stumbling or offending minority groups, and the concern that a policy would be perceived as racist, exclusive, elitesque, or plain unfair are all well-known aspects among our adversaries.
The problem with attempting to please everyone is you probably may end up with additional vulnerabilities in your risk map as a result of adding more variables to deal with.
Foreign and internal adversaries capitalize on those anxieties, either by disseminating disinformation (including exploitative language manipulation) to increase pressure to disrupt peace or by funding persons, groups, and/or campaigns to produce leverage for a proxy.
Cyber counterintelligence (CCI) will need to broaden their understanding by examining future deception initiatives’ nature and potential goals.
One of the most prevalent, but also less expensive, methods of influencing a company's or organization's reputation is through social media campaigns.
It can start as follow: adversaries will attempt to reach as many personnel as possible through a systematic and well-organized effort on sites such as LinkedIn and Instagram, claiming to be current employees (or ex) who have suffered a case of injustice, sexual harassment, bigotry, etc. Comments and conversations will be encouraged by them.
The idea is to create tensions to help 'seed' potential insiders. At the same time, adversaries use sentiment analysis tools to monitor the social media of the targeted pool of employees to try to narrow down those who appear affected or angry at the company. Those who stand out may become potential recruits /inside sources or targets for further development.
Once the adversaries have identified the individuals, they can be contacted by deepfakes -acting as other employees- who want to provide 'potentially threatening information against the organization. They will promise to provide documents (clearly fake) that prove such allegations.
Those incentives placed in the hands of a disgruntled or persuaded employee with some level of internal leadership can cause a slew of internal issues for a company.
Artificial intelligence will augment these types of attacks through continuous advancements in machine learning, neural networks, and facial recognition algorithms, which will improve the quality and realism of deepfakes' (understood as the combination of synthetic media to create content for a particular context to manipulate and deceive).
¿How can CCI mitigate and respond to such campaigns?; ¿What are the patterns that CCI should watch to develop scenarios for assessments? Part III will go through this.