Cyber

Digital democracies, understood not only as those that are digitizing the voting process, but also as those in which citizens have extensive access to the Internet, run the double risk of being attacked both during the holding of the elections themselves, through cyberattacks, such as through disinformation campaigns. Given that digitization -at least in some aspects- does not seem reversible, protection measures will have to be established to prevent a repetition of what happened in electoral campaigns such as the 2016 US election or the May 2019 elections to the European Parliament. Virtually all electoral systems in democratic countries predate the Internet and social networks, so obviously they were not originally designed to prevent possible external interference.  Until only a decade ago, it was unthinkable that a State could deploy an influence operation on the electorate of a third state […]

The Russia Ukraine war in the cyber domain has turned out very differently than expected. Before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, this state was already noted for the hyperactivity and lack of stealth in its cyber activities. NotPetya, SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, were just some examples that allowed us to observe the offensive capabilities that Russia had in cyberspace. Although this situation has been considerably altered by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, since Russia has seen war as a way of testing its abilities in the cyber domain on a large scale, it is also true that, far from what they could have thought a lot of experts, the “cyber-armageddon” has not occurred. In fact, one of the big questions that has been formulated since the invasion began – and to which we will try to answer in the following lines – […]

In the age of communications, where social networks have taken on a particularly relevant role in Western societies, together with the phenomenon of cyberattacks, an even more intangible security vulnerability has been verified: the existence of disinformation operations in the cyberspace in order to modify public opinion and existing currents of thought in society. However, despite its new propagation vector in the cyber domain (social networks), the phenomenon of misinformation is not a new tool in conflicts. Already in the XNUMXth century BC, the Chinese General Sun Tzu pointed out that “the art of war is deception”. (Sun Tzu). And closer to our time, between 1933 and 1945, we could appreciate the full power of disinformation as a weapon of war by studying the figure of Joseph Goebbles, Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda of the German Third Reich: “It is […]