Page 53 - Cyber Defense eMagazine for September 2020

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(disinformation). It is carried out by: sending emails; organizing news groups; creating sites for the
exchange of opinions; posting information on individual pages or in electronic versions of periodicals and
network broadcasting (broadcasts of radio and TV stations). An example of this is a series of civil protests
in the USA in 2011 (web.archive.org, 2013). Its organizing force was the social network Facebook and
the micro blog Twitter. It was from there that anti-government slogans and calls for civil disobedience
were heard.

The most common way to use cyberspace in the interests of the conflicts is to replace the information
content of sites, which consists in replacing pages or their individual elements as a result of hacking.
Such actions are taken mainly to draw attention to the attacking side, demonstrate their capabilities, or
are a way of expressing a certain political position. In addition to direct page substitution, it is widely used
to register sites of opposite content in search engines using the same keywords, as well as redirecting
(replacing) links to another address, which leads to the opening of specially prepared pages by the
opposing party.

We should highlight the so-called semantic attacks, which consist in hacking pages and then carefully
(without noticeable traces of hacking) placing deliberately false information on them. Such attacks are
usually carried out on the most frequently visited information pages, the content of which users fully trust.

Another way to use the Internet in the interests of information warfare is to disable or reduce the
effectiveness of the functioning of the structural elements of the network. The most commonly used ways
to reduce the effectiveness of its individual elements are DOS attack and the introduction of computer
viruses. So, the military Department of Taiwan has created about 1 thousand such viruses, which in the
event of a crisis can disable the computer systems of the PRC. Their ability to break through the
telecommunications network of the "enemy" was tested during the exercise.

As well as in physical world, in virtual domain of our surrounding, people, channels, articles, and websites
shape our mentality. Reasonable people understand that a company of neo-Nazi on the street will not do
any good but continue sitting on the extremist channels. Conscious citizens realize that believing tabloids
with poor evidence and getting free money on the street is non-credible but go on reading
recommendation articles and click on strange ads called "SEND US YOUR DATA AND GET FREE
MONEY". We are extremely vulnerable right now because we do not have skills required to correctly
identify information needed to perform a specific task or solve a problem. As a result, we are exposed to
technical and informational attacks and, therefore, our values can be shaped and data can be stolen. It
leads to social disintegration, and national security suffers.

Post-digital time is transforming modern civilization, and new technologies require a change in mentality.
Currently, the world community is undergoing a transformation, correlated with the change of epochs and
cultures. Today goods, services, and even the environment of people are individually configured.
Companies and states focus on each person in every aspect of their lives, shaping the reality in which
they live. We are living in post-digital time when mobility and portability, simple user interfaces, and easy
accessibility to the Internet, including the use of cloud services and open web standards, as well as
mobile applications with the ability to seamlessly synchronize information between different devices take
place. At such critical moments, the issue of security as a basic need is always acute – the new replaces
the established old and at the stage of its origin brings with it something uncontrolled and unmanageable,
since the mechanisms for controlling and managing this new have not yet been formed. That is why

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