There has been a lot of fresh news (not fake news) about Russia's social media efforts to shape the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. This includes Special Counsel Mueller's indictment of 13 Russian nationals last week, which we reported on.
Now, the Washington Post has interviewed a man who actually worked for the agency responsible for the Russian disinformation campaign.
Mindiyarov, the teacher, said he was paid about $700 a month to work a 12-hour shift, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.—two days on, two days off. His job was to write comments to append to Russian-language news items, toiling in a room with 20 computers and the window blinds closed, and required to hit post quotas.
Sometimes, he said, he and his colleagues would engage in a group troll in which they would pretend to hold different views of the same subject and argue about it in public online comments. Eventually, one of the group would declare he had been convinced by the others. “Those are the kinds of plays we had to act out,” he said.
Income disparity is driving cybercrime and cyber threats
Would you be willing to do something like this—or turn to a life of cyber crime—if you could make significantly more money?
I'm reminded of what Cigna CISO James Beeson told me during an interview at one of our regional SecureWorld cybersecurity conferences.
“Population dynamics and income disparity are fueling malicious activity in the world,” he said.
“If you’re making $10 a day and you can make more using malware as a service, or a syndicated crime syndicate offers you $20 a day to help penetrate networks, what are you going to do?”
What would you do for double your income if you were barely making enough to survive?
Beeson says increased connectivity around the world, including more high speed internet access than ever before, is increasing the number of cyber threats and bad actors we face.
In the case of the Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, technology played a part, for sure. The Mueller indictment says, "... the Organization's IT department purchased space on computer servers located inside the United States in order to set up VPNs."
So how does Facebook plan to fight back against social media dis-information campaigns by those in other countries? With postcards.
That's right, Facebook is using postcards to fight back against all our new-fangled technology.
