DOJO Details

One Day Workshop on March 19, 2024 (Tuesday)

Attendance:

• In-Person Only

No digital recording will be provided after the course ends.

Last updated: February 20, 2024

DOJO Abstract

Over the past 5-7 years, the term ‘fake news’ has become more and more common. Previously referred to as propaganda or campaigns to influence the thoughts and perceptions of the masses, we now call the same thing ”active measures.”

Regardless of semantics, Influence Operations are very real and have existed for centuries; In the exact same way as nailing paper to a door or inventing the printing press, the Communications Revolution of the last half century has again forever changed the method used.

What has not changed, however, is the strategic objectives of the latest incarnation of the Influencer. Beware of geeks bearing gifts… because of course, the ’new’ factor is the geek. With the advent of social media, Influence Operations have acquired a new method of distribution, which is more dynamic, far-reaching, and allows better targeting and highly accurate feedback. Although this method is indeed very powerful, it is not what IO is all about. 

IO is way more than bots on social or mainstream media. Those operations are designed to influence human beings, not bots. While chasing Russian bots on Twitter and Facebook is relatively easy, it does little to deter the end goal of an IO campaign, especially since the objectives are difficult to infer. This makes counteracting an IO campaign and denying its objectives particularly difficult. 

In this workshop, the author delivers a fusion of theoretical knowledge and practical examples intertwined in an active discussion. The workshop is designed for a technical audience who work in social media and the information operations space. The knowledge section covers the basics of communications theory, aiming to make the concepts accessible to non-practitioners in the field. 

The presenter will cover the two-step flow of information, gatekeeping, agenda-setting, priming, framing, the spiral of silence, echo chambers, cultivation, and other important media effects. Furthermore, the workshop will also cover some not well understood classes of operations, such as Discoverable and Reflexive Operations. Last but not least, it covers topics from NLP, Cognitive science, and, specifically, how our brains process information and how this is exploited by some of the above-mentioned media effects and techniques.

While this workshop is political and focuses on the theory, there are examples that will be covered that are politically charged, so the presenter requests that the attendees keep the discourse civil regardless of their feelings. This is one of the hallmarks of a successful Influence Operation - when the target audience is not rational in their behavior but works solely based on “instinct.”

DOJO Outline

• Introduction

• Cognitive domain operations

• Influence Operations

• PSYOPs

• Introduction to communications theory

• Foundations

  • Hypodermic needle model (aka propaganda)

  • Two-step flow of information

  • Agenda-setting

  • Gatekeeping

  • The filter bubble

• Advanced concepts

  • Priming

  • Framing

  • The spiral of silence

  • Echo chambers

  • Cultivation

• Cognitive processes

• Schemata

• Biases

  • Fast and Slow Thinking Processes

• Ideological Subversion

• Bezmenov’s Subversion Model

  • Stages of ideological subversion

  • Subversion metrics

  • Polarization of the US society

  • Examples of political organizations form the past

• Reflexive operations

  • Discussion and examples

• Conclusions and future work

About the Instructor: Krassimir Tzvetanov

For the past four years Krassimir Tzvetanov has been a graduate student at Purdue University, focusing his research on Homeland Security, Threat Intelligence, Operational Security Research, and Social Media Influence Operations in the cyber domain.

Before that, Krassimir was a security architect at Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) designed to accelerate content delivery and serve as a WAF and a shield against DDoS attacks. His current focus is on incident response and investigations, threat intelligence, and security systems architecture.

In the past, he worked for hardware vendors like Cisco and A10 focusing on threat research and information exchange, DDoS mitigation features, product security and security software development best practices. Before joining Cisco, Krassimir was a Dedicated Paranoid (security) at Yahoo!, Inc., where he focused on designing and securing the edge infrastructure of the production network. Part of his duties included dealing with DDoS and abuse. Before Yahoo! Krassimir worked at Google, Inc. as an SRE for two mission-critical systems, the ads database supporting all incoming revenue from ads and the global authentication system which served all of the company applications.

Krassimir is very active in the security research and investigation community, has a number of contributions to FIRST SIGs, and participates in the Honeynet Project.

In addition, Krassimir ran the BayThreat security conference and has contributed to a number of other events like DefCon, where he ran the Radio Communications group, and ShmooCon and DC650.

Krassimir holds Bachelors in Electrical Engineering (Communications), Masters in Digital Forensics and Investigations, and Masters in Information Technology with a focus on Homeland Security.