Underground Tradecraft

Counterintelligence, OPSEC and Tradecraft for everyone. https://gru.gq

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXBrL-mdowY

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Sharing Truths About the Self: Theorizing News Reposting on Social Media

This is great

People don’t share on social media to share information but to signal.

a myriad of solutions against misinformation—from media literacy training to fact- checking—strive to help individual users make more reliable reposting choices. These interventions assume that citizens aim to spread true stories, yet lack the skills or information to reliably distinguish fact from fiction. However, a growing body of research suggests that this might not accurately reflect what drives reposting behavior.

Pennycook and colleagues (2021), for example, found evidence for an inattention-based account of misinformation spreading, suggesting that people generally wish to avoid disseminating false content and are typically able to tell truth from falsehood—but, in the context of social media, their attention is focused on factors besides accuracy. When deciding which news to repost, users are not primarily concerned with the story’s accuracy but with something else altogether.

We routinely engage in many communicative acts—from joking, gossiping, and storytelling to outright lying—where telling the truth is not the main objective. This article aims to contribute to the theorization of social media reposting as a form of goal-oriented communication. If users’ main objective behind reposting news is not to transmit accurate information to their network, what other purpose does this activity primarily serve?

To answer this question, this article explores seven key affordances enabled by Facebook and Twitter’s news sharing functions, namely visibility, scalability, persistence, association, meta-voicing, interactivity, and immediacy. Taken together, I argue that, beyond facilitating the forwarding of information, these affordances also render reposting an effective means for self-presentation.

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A Key Reason for Russia’s Colossal Electronic Warfare Failure in Ukraine

Six weeks into the war, it’s clear that Russian Electronic Warfare/Electronic Attack (EW/EA) systems have been largely ineffective.

Great article on electronic warfare

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/nyregion/cruxy-oconnor-ira-spy-wednesday.html

Cruxy O’Connor and the Central Park Ambush

One hundred years ago this week, the British spy was caught in what appears to be the Irish Republican Army’s only authorized attack on Amer

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When the Mongols Set Out to Conquer the World, There Was Only One Limiting Factor: Grass | Historynet

The steppe nomads invented the operational level of war, with the essential nutrient for their herds dictating where—and when—they fought.

Dr Wayne Lee is great reading

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https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/spycast/532/notes

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Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents - bellingcat

The Yandex.Food leak implicates thousands of Russian users, including military personnel

Cyber is much more pervasive than people accept. Infrastructure is deeply embedded in our lives.

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https://ssu.gov.ua/en/novyny/sbu-vykryla-novu-vorozhu-botofermu-u-kharkovi-video

Cyber operations continue to be practical rather than extraordinary.

SSU exposes another bot farm in Kharkiv (video)

SSU exposes another bot farm in Kharkiv (video)

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The drone operators who halted Russian convoy headed for Kyiv

Special IT force of 30 soldiers on quad bikes is vital part of Ukraine’s defence, but forced to crowdfund for supplies

The unit is also looking at ways to overcome Russian jamming, part of the electronic warfare being waged in Ukraine in parallel to the bombs, shells and missiles. At present, Aerorozvidka typically waits for the Russians turn off their jamming equipment to launch their own drones, and then it sends up its machines at the same time. The unit then concentrates its firepower on the electronic warfare vehicles.

Honchar describes these technological battles, and Aerorozvidka’s way of fighting, as the future of warfare, in which swarms of small teams networked together by mutual trust and advanced communications can overwhelm a bigger and more heavily armed adversary.

“We are like a hive of bees,” he said. “One bee is nothing, but if you are faced with a thousand, it can defeat a big force.

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KA-SAT Network cyber attack overview

Viasat is providing an overview and incident report on the cyber-attack against the KA-SAT network, which occurred on 24 February 2022, and

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Ukraine: Cyber Operations and Digital Technologies

Towards the end of 2021, Russia began a military build-up around Ukraine. Then, after several months unsuccessfully pressuring the Ukrainian

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https://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/who_says_you_cant_predict_the_future/

Who Says You Can’t Predict the Future?

The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) is currently viewed as one of the world’s leading cente

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Countering threats from North Korea

On February 10, Threat Analysis Group discovered two distinct North Korean government-backed attacker groups exploiting a remote code execut

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Malware hunters at Google have spotted signs that North Korean government hackers are sharing zero-day browser exploits (CVE-2022-0609) for

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/23/fbi-russia-spy-recruiting-ukraine/

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'Bizarro World' - The Boston Globe

Lol

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Combined farces: Russia’s early military failures in Ukraine

The Kremlin’s secrecy in waging war on Ukraine has created severe problems on the battlefield. Inadequate force generation seems responsible