As if chief information security officers (CISOs) did not have enough to deal with, add one more issue to their plates: information warfare. These operations now target private and non-governmental entities almost as often as they involve world powers. That’s why it’s more important than ever to know the difference between misinformation and disinformation — and how to stop them both.
Information wars are old. They date back millennia, as does the strategy of deception in warfare. Despite the age and use of disinformation, we’ve seen a recent uptick in discussion on the subject. Run a small experiment: perform an internet search for material from before 2016 on the word “disinformation” and see how many fewer results there are than what you’d find today. You’ll find first-page results with publish dates spanning the 2010s. Go a couple of pages in and you may see references to books from the 80s and 90s. Search that term today, though, and it takes quite a few clicks to find something that wasn’t written in 2021.
Why the uptick? More information, for one. It does not matter if it is credible or not. It’s out there. The information age means almost anyone can become a publisher. Blogs are cheap to maintain, content creators are seeing returns on investments, advertisers are enjoying click-through revenue and social media is an amplifier. All these are good things. And they also come with noise.
Cutting Through the Noise
Two sets of ideas can help CISOs discover and limit information campaigns against their organization. And while these appear similar ..
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