'Understand What You Believe': Fmr. FBI Agent Unpacks Information Threats

'Understand What You Believe': Fmr. FBI Agent Unpacks Information Threats
In the past few years, social media has transformed from a communications gold mine to a minefield of disinformation campaigns.

CPX 360 – New Orleans, La. – Social media, initially built to improve global communications, has become a weapon in the hands of cybercriminals launching disinformation campaigns.


CEO Gil Shwed used the world's growing interconnectedness as the topic to begin his morning keynote at the Check Point CPX 360 conference, and he used the Olympics to illustrate just how connected we have become. The 1996 Atlanta Olympics generated 171 hours of coverage, he noted. One decade later, the 2016 summer games in Rio de Janeiro generated 6,755 hours.


"Everything has to do with technology," Shwed said. Ticket reservations, hotel bookings, and viewings of Olympic events are all done online. "Every transaction around an event like the Olympics has to be built using the Internet and using the connected world." Still, the benefit of using the Internet to make the Olympics a more global event is countered by potential threats.


"Protecting all of our systems is a problem that's becoming bigger and bigger," he added.


This sentiment extended into a keynote talk by Clint Watts, former special agent for the FBI and distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He spoke to the rapid growth of social media and its role as a boon to communications and evolving attack vector.


"The information landscape has changed," said Watts. People championed social media in 2011, when it was used to anonymously communicate during the Arab Spring. By 2016, only a few years later, those same platforms had entered a new era: "the rise of the trolls," as he put it.


Today's social networks, used among billions of people for legitimate communications, double as a space for the Inte ..

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