Malign Influence Operations Safari
Pack your gear, we're going big game hunting.
Second quarter of 2024 is going to be all about malign influence operations. We have a variety of live targets already and that is only going to escalate. They’re pervasive, the space is so crowded and fast moving that most of them are making mistakes allowing attribution.
Attention Conservation Notice:
This is going to be technically and operationally intense. Forewarned is forearmed.
Suggested Reading:
What Makes An Influence Operation Malign
Tactics of Disinformation by CISA
Local Journalism without Journalists? Metric Media and the Future of Local News
Exploring ADINT
Gephi Visualization Tutorial
These are all in the Safari Dropbox folder and I’ll add anything else I notice that seems worthwhile. There’s also some 2019 training material from RiskIQ, which is useful even if you don’t have an account.
Suggested Books:
HLR is really good if you’re brand new and need some technology hand holding. I mean REALLY, REALLY GOOD. The OSINT book is a famous resource suitable to most everyone. The other two are demanding and technical.
Tooling Up:
We are absolutely going to use these:
Maltego Community Edition
SEOQuake
Gephi
BuiltWith
You should try to wrangle access to these paid services and tools:
Hunchly
Inoreader
Maltego paid client.
Semrush
RiskIQ or its successor
And we might end up using some of these:
You can review Situational Awareness and Prepared Prowler for additional suggestions.
Conclusion:
This quarter’s focus builds on both the 4th quarter topic The Online Operation Kill Chain and the less well covered 1st quarter PANOPTIC material. Those were explorations of doctrine with some real world examples. This quarter will be the reverse; lots of taking that stuff out into the field and using it on live targets, with only occasional new doctrine related content.
That’s that. Let’s get cracking …