Content Weapons Primer: Cognitive Hacking

While you already heard about hacking, you may be wondering what cognitive hacking is.

The reality is that when you think of hacking, you immediately think about a network being attacked, or hacked, by someone who is a computer nerd and who can be anywhere in the world. Besides, probably also think about someone who is doing this just to see if he can.

So, if you think about it, this is the picture that TV series and movies show us.

What Is Cognitive Hacking?

One of the things that you need to know is that it’s not difficult to understand the concept of cognitive hacking. The reality is that it simply refers to the use of an information system such as social media, for example, or a computer to launch a different attack.

While the goal of a hacker is related to see what he can do, the goal of cognitive hacking is to change the human users’ perceptions and behaviors.

A Cognitive Hacking Example

One of the best well-known examples of cognitive hacking is Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian operatives. While it takes things up to an extreme (which usually doesn’t happen), it also shows how effective cognitive hackings can be.

This indictment showed how easy and affordable it can be to impact the United States political elections from Russia, only using social media networks. While we are referring to this example, the truth is that there are many others and most of them occur for much more mundane goals or purposes.

One of the things that most people think of when they picture a cognitive hacking is that it is something like email fishing campaigns. After all, these are aimed to access your data when you click on an unsuspecting link. Nevertheless, this Russia attack is a lot more elaborate and also effective than what most people think.

How Can You Defend Against Cognitive Hacking?

If we go back to Russia’s example, Russian’s goal was to persuade and convince Americans that something had happened.

In the old days, whenever Russia wanted to attack the United States, they needed to spend millions or billions of dollars in a military arms race. However, this is no longer the case. And truth to be said, cognitive hacking is much more effective. After all, you have the ability to influence the citizens of another country through information warfare.

While you may think that this was the first international cognitive hacking, then you’ll be surprised by knowing that this has been being done for years to influence elections in Latin America.

Defending against cognitive hacking is not easy. While the general public is only now becoming aware of the problem, the truth is that researchers, governments, academics, and even law enforcement have been studying this problem for decades.

So, we believe that the first step is being taken at the moment. After all, allowing the general public to be aware of this problem is making them more alert and wanting to question everything they see and read.

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#MichaelStattelman