Global Guerrillas

Open Question: How would you repurpose a Spam Bot for info warfare?

My last post on spam bots openned up an interesting question:  how would you repurpose them for info warfare?

Spam bots can interact with us via:

• e-mail,
• phonecalls, and
• text messages.

Add your ideas to the discussion below.  

The IRS Bot Scam from Pakistan

I just got a call from the IRS bot today.  It threatened me in a computerized voice with an audit and prompted me to call it back to take with an agent.  

Of course, the call I got wasn't the IRS.  The IRS doesn't initiate an audit that way (it mails you).  

It was from scam bot from Pakistan.

In this case, the bot used an Internet connection to the US to dial my number.  That provided it with the number of 1-202-241-0331 which resolved to an official looking caller ID for the "District of Columbia".

If you haven't noticed already, most of the calls we get on our phones now are spam.   Why?

• Mismanaged phone companies.  The idiots running the phone companies look the other way when it comes to phone scams because of the $ they pump into the system.  Apparently, being a regulated monopoly wasn't enough.
• Backward technology.  The phone companies don't use Baysean spam filters and customer ratings/feedback to weed out phone scammers like g-mail etc. do.  This specific scam has been using this number for weeks without any action being taken to block it.
• A broken law enforcement/national security system.  Our security system now treats us as the criminals which is why IRS scams are a multi-billion dollar business every year.  Worse, it completely ignores a constant onslaught of frauds and scams that damage us, from Wall Street's multi-trillion dollar "too big to prosecute" frauds to daily telephone/e-mail bot hacks like this one.

Why is this important?

What's interesting to me is how easily this type of bot attack can be adopted by global guerrillas for large scale and very effective attacks on the US.  

I'll have more detail on this in my upcoming e-booklet: iWar.  

Hopefully, I'll get it up on Amazon/etc. this week.

 

Neutralizing the Cyberwarfare Bazaar

Most of the weapons used cyberwarfare aren't being built in secret government labs.

They are being built for sale in global cyberbazaars by private individuals living in countries all over the world.  

The fact is that most of the people in the US national security system don't get this.  

Dan Greer, the information guru at the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel, does.

To that end, he has developed some interesting proposals for improving cybersecurity in a world run by global guerrillas.

Proposal 1:   The US should be a buyer of zero-day exploits.  The US should buy them on the cybermarket and expose them to neutralize them.  It works becauce the US has the potential to outbid all other buyers in any auction handily.  

The flaw in this?  The US national security system would need to act in the public interest and reveal these exploits.  I'm not sure the US national security system can do that.  It's not in its nature.

Proposal 2:  The US should adopt a CDC (Centers of Disease Control) approach to any hack on a US company.   

The CDC approach is simple.  Whenever certain infectious diseases show up at any hospital (from Ebola to West Nile), medical privacy goes out the window and it must be reported.  

The proposal is that certain types of hacks must be reported in the same way, so that they can be rapidly dealt with before other companies or organizations fall victim to it.

The flaw?  Most hacks aren't reported because the company involved wants to avoid the negative PR associated with it.  That means it's likely that mandatory reporting would be vigorously opposed by corporate America.  

Proposal 3:  Increase the liability of software vendors that ship compiled code for the losses due to hacks on that software.  Additionally, eliminate the liability of software vendors that ship open source code (with copyright).  

The flaw?  Lots of vested interestes in the software industry will fight this tooth and nail.  Not going to happen.

Kurds In Last Ditch Stand to Save Capital -- Call in the Drones?

Some random bits on ISIS and Iraq:

• Stupidity persists.   The White House spokesman is repeatedly saying, "There are no military solutions to the problems of Iraq."  The implication is that there are political solutions.  That's clearly wrong.  ISIS will keep expanding until it is stopped on the ground.  Military solutions are the only solutions right now.
• ISIS not only has oil now, it has electricity.  It just took Iraq's biggest hydroelectric dam (Haditha).  Control over energy provides a minimal legitimacy to ISIS.  It would be smart to shut them down.
• ISIS is now minutes from Irbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish zone in Iraq.  Unfortunately for the secular Kurds, they won't be able to mount much of a defense.  They don't the weapons to do it due to embargoes from the Turks and Iraqis.  Arm them.  

This is also where militarized drones could rapidly turn the tide of the war.  

ISIS is stretched thin due to the speed of its advance.  It's winning more from speed and suprise than from force of arms.  Drones of the right type could turn this around with very little risk.  

ISIS is betting quite a bit on inaction by the West on this.  This bet is paying off.  The US is ignoring ISIS because recognition of it as a threat would require the US to admit it lost the war in Iraq (and that the decision to invade was a terrible mistake).

PS:  This is a good demonstration of why a drone carrier is more valuable than a standard aircraft carrier in terms of projecting power.  100x more drones per ship than aicraft.  All personnel remain onboard, out of harms way.  

McClatchy has a great photo of abandoned cars on the road to Irbil that ran out of gas trying to escape the ISIS advance:

History Will Be Written by the Bots

"History is written by the victors"  Winston Churchill

Churchill was right.

In the case of humanity, our history is going to be written by bots.

Bots aren't just mechanical.  They are also made out of software.  

Software bots already dominate trading on Wall Street and they are making inroads in nearly every knowledge-based profession. 

They are also doing more and more of the writing being done online.

For example, bots write nearly all of the earnings reports put out of the earnings announcements by the Associated Press.  

One Wikipedia editor has used bots to write over 3 million articles for the online encylopedia.  

That's just the start.  Bot writing will quickly outpace the writing done by human beings.  

One reason is that all of the writing already online can be analyzed, parsed, cut, pasted, and repurposed by writing bots.  Think about that for a second.  We've already put billions of pages of written material online with much more to come.  Billions of pages of the raw material bots need to "fake" articles on any topic, no matter how new it is.  

From an iWar perspective, bot writing is very powerful.

Writing by bot makes it possible for people to manufacture discussion or controversy on a global scale, by writing thousands of articles and posting them to tens of thousands of sites in dozens of languages (and even voting them up on Reddit, Facebook, and Google to get them coverage).  

Think of this as Yellow Journalism by bot.  Select a topic, pick a political slant, pick the sites to troll/inflame, press the button and wait for the fireworks.

 

iWar 101: Kicking the Squirrel

Here are some screen caps from a new video that is creating a firestorm of anger across the Internet.

In it, two guys on vacation, lure a squirrel to the edge of the Grand Canyon with food and then boot it off the edge.

Given the coverage this video is getting, it won't be long before these men are identified in real life and villified and harrassed.

I'm calling this effect:  "kicking the squirrel"

It's part of the iWar arsenal since it can be used for blackmail and for removing a key individual from a position of influence/power.

Here's how it works.

Evidence -- video, pictures, or story (in descending value) -- of bad behavior is posted online in a public forum.  

This evidence can be from any source, it doesn't matter where it came from.

There are a variety of bad behaviors that elicit an immediate and angry reaction.  Here they are in descending order:

1. Cruelty to animals.  
2. Pedophilia of any type.  Violence to children..
3. Violence to women or brazen infidelity.    
4. A demonstration of sexism, racism, homophobia, or anti-Semitism (effects are dependent on the identity of the person demonstrating it). 

The effects of this type of attack typically result in:

1. A crowd-sourced search for the individual's identity.
2. Vilification of the individual both on-line and off (in China and other places, people will find and follow you).  Harassment.
3. Loss of job or status.  It creates reputational damage that can last for years.

This can be a very effective way to remove key people from an organizational target.  For example, Brendan Eich was forced out of his position as the CEO of Mozilla merely for contributing $1,000 to a CA proposition that blocked same sex marriage.  

This is going to become an increasingly powerful technique in the near future.  Why?  

Your reputation will be critical to doing anything, from getting a date to buying or selling anything both online and off, much sooner than you think.  

PS:  Here's the complete video (it may be taken down).

PPS:  A big thanks to Bobby for the improved "Robb" logo. 

A Bot in Every Garage and on Every Street

Here's an idea on how fast bots are going to roll out and why botageddon in some form is inevitable.  

Morgan Stanley (with good reason) anticipates that 100% of all of the automobiles sold in the US will be self-driving by 2026.  

That's only 12 years from now.

What's pushing this forward so fast?  

Driving bots are already do a better job at driving than people do.  

Based on the data so far, if 90% of the cars on the road were driven by bots, we'd have 14,000 fewer deaths in the US alone from traffic accidents.  That figure alone means that the insurance rates for human drivers are going to be so high (driving by hand will be considered reckless), that few people will be able to afford to do it.  

The reason this is interesting is that even if we restrict our analysis to automobiles alone, it means that there will be millions of bots on the road in a little over a decade.  

Not only that:  

• most of these bots will be autonomous, which means that they can make decisions for themselves
• almost all will have a large array of sensors and cameras onboard (from radar to range finding lasers to video to infrared...) that are constantly gathering the data needed to navigate the roads
• Much of the collected data will be sent to the net wirelessly, so when one of these bots learns something new, every bot that connects to its network learns it too.

Ponder this idea for a while.  Think about world where you are surrounded by bots in every location and in every role.

Is botageddon getting easier to imagine?

ISIS Opens The World's Biggest Bazaar of Violence

ISIS isn't a state and it's not your typical insurgency.

It's much more interesting than that.

ISIS is a marketplace -- a freewheeling bazaar of violence -- and it is rapidly expanding.   

So far, it's been very successful:

• it operates freely in an area bigger than most countries (and it has lots of oil),
• it has been attracting the participation of a growing number of organizations and individuals, and
• it's financially successful and self-funding (it's already made billions of $$ from oil, crime, bank robberies, and more).

This success is due to the fact that ISIS isn't trying to build a "state."  It's not a government. 

It's a bazaar in an autonomous zone.  It operates outside of the global system.  It doesn't want to be a state (which would make it vulnerable).   

This bazaar was built for one purpose:  perpetual expansion and continuous warfare.

To keep things running, ISIS offers a minimalist, decentralized governance.  Day-to-day life is governed by a simple, decentralized rule set: Sharia Law.

Participation is open to everyone willing to live under Sharia and able to expand the bazaar to new areas.

The strategies and tactics ISIS uses are open sourced.  Any group or individual can advance them, as long as they can demonstrate they work.  

Weapons and other technologies needed for war are developed, shared and sold between participants and the pace of development based on previous examples is very quick.

Making money through criminal activity is highly encouraged.  Mercenary work is encouraged.  

All of these attributes (and more) make ISIS hard to fight (something similar to this fought US forces to a standstill for four years in a much less advanced state until Petraeus started using a strategy similar to this).

It also demonstrates that global guerrillas are the cockroaches of warfare.  Once they become established, they are nearly impossible to get rid of.