Instructor: Influence campaigns.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about influence campaigns,
what they are and how they're used.
And the first point I want to make
is that influence is power.
This is something that is well known
by military and political leaders.
And that's why influence operations
and influence campaigns exist.
Now, when I talk about influence operation,
this is a collection of tactical information
about an adversary,
as well as the dissemination of propaganda
in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent.
Now, that's a really nice fluffy way of saying
you want to take information and use it against someone.
That's what influence operations is all about.
Now, influence operations is really the military term,
but in the compTIA objectives,
they use the term influence campaign instead.
An influence campaign
is one small part of a larger influence operation,
but we're going to use these terms
interchangeably throughout this lesson.
Now, when we talk about
an influence campaign or an influence operation,
what exactly is it?
Well, as I went through the news today,
I found an article that says US election 2020:
who do Russia, China, and Iran want to win?
And it goes on to talk about
the fact that these three countries
are trying to influence the US elections.
Now, how can they influence it?
Well, there's a couple ways they could do this.
One way might be for them to actually wage war against us.
That will be one way to do it.
But that's pretty abrupt and very in your face.
So instead, what a lot of these countries do
is they use influence operations instead.
By using influence operations,
you can start changing the narrative
on places like social media, in the newspapers,
or even in the general populace.
And by doing that, you can start changing
the way the country thinks, the country acts,
and the country votes.
And that is what's going on.
Now, as I said,
influence operations
are something that's often done by militaries.
And it's a form of hybrid warfare.
When we talk about hybrid warfare,
this is a military strategy
that employs the full spectrum of warfare.
It's going to use political warfare
and blending conventional warfare
like dropping bombs and shooting guns.
It's going to use a regular warfare
like special operation teams and even cyber warfare.
And when you're doing cyber warfare,
you can use influencing methods,
things like putting out fake news,
things like using diplomacy
or foreign electoral intervention.
There's lots of things you can do
as part of this hybrid warfare,
and under hybrid warfare,
influence operations
is part of the grander military strategy.
Now, you may be wondering
why are we talking military strategy
in a class on cyber security?
Well, it's because it's being used in the cyber realm
and it's being used inside our corporate networks.
For instance, some of our large companies out there
like Facebook and Twitter
have been used to do these influence campaigns.
If you look back to our 2016 election in the United States,
there has been proof that the Russians
were running an influence campaign.
According to the New York Times,
the Russian influence campaign on social media
in the 2016 election
made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans
and used an array tactics to try to suppress voter turnout
among those democratic voters
and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram
that was actually higher
or exceeded the amount of posts on Facebook.
Even though when we look at the news,
most of the things that we're talking about
was the fact that the Russians
were influencing data on Facebook.
And hear in the 2020 elections,
they've tried to overcome that with Facebook,
by going through and creating different algorithms
and different ways to say this might be fake news.
But again, this doesn't mean that the other countries
are going to stop trying to interfere in the elections.
This is something that has a global power dynamic,
and us as people who use social media
are caught in the middle.
So you have to be aware of this
because it is being used against you.
I don't know about you,
but I spend quite a bit of time on social media.
My favorite happens to be Facebook,
but I know other people who like
TikTok and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat
and all of these things,
there are operations that are being used
to influence you and influence your mind.
I know I sound crazy, I know I sound paranoid,
but whether you believe me or not,
for the exam, you need to realize
that influence campaigns are a thing,
and you need to understand
that they're used as part of hybrid warfare
and they're used over social media
as the transmission mechanism.