Finding and Characterizing Information Warfare Campaigns

Abstract

Today the borderless internet is used by state and non-state actors to manipulate information and societies in ways that were unheard of 50 years ago. Malicious actors can rapidly conduct information maneuvers with little cost at unprecedented scales to achieve far reaching consequences across the internet. They do this byexploiting features of the various social media platforms and the way humans naturally understand what they read and hear. These cyber-mediated threats to open anddemocratic societies have led to an emerging discipline known as social cybersecurity. While various aspects of these campaigns have been explored, little research hasfocused on the campaign level of engagement. Our research seeks to answer the question: How can information warfare campaigns be identified and characterizedquickly? Our goal is to 1) Improve understanding of information operations, and 2) Develop techniques to rapidly identify key factors such as bots and memes.To accomplish this, I present the strategic context of the information warfare that we see today, and identify and define information warfare forms of maneuver. I developvarious supervised and unsupervised methods to identify bots at four different data granularities. I present a deep learning model to classify memes as well as studythe evolution of memes within a conversation. I present a template for understanding the major components of an information campaign and develop automatic waysto populate this template for a specific event. Finally, we present a Bot, Cyborg, and Troll Field Guide to help analysts and the general population understand these entities.