NAME: DUUT EMMANUEL
TITLE: SOCIAL CYBERSECURITY, A NEW AREA OF NATIONAL SECURITY.
DATE: 03/29/2025
I read an intriguing piece today about social cybersecurity, a new area of national security that will have a big effect on future wars. The article by Lt. Col. David M. Beskow and Kathleen M. Carley, PhD, goes into excellent detail about the complicated field of social cybersecurity. They define it as the study of figuring out and predicting how people’s behavior, culture, and politics will change because of technology. It stresses how important it is to build cyber-infrastructure to protect society from cyber risks. One important thing that was talked about is the change from standard cybersecurity, which is about keeping computer systems safe, to social cybersecurity, which is about protecting people and how societies work. This new way of doing things, which is sometimes called “cognitive hacking,” uses technology to change people’s views and ideas at a speed and on a scale that have never been seen before.
The piece shows how important information warfare is from a strategic perspective, mainly by looking at Russian operations. It talks about how Russia has used lies in the past to weaken enemies and how new technology has made these efforts stronger. It presents the concept of an “information blitzkrieg,” akin to the swift and overwhelming tactics employed in physical warfare. A big part of the piece is about the BEND model, which divides different types of social-cyber maneuvering into good and bad actions that affect how information and networks are manipulated. This model helps us understand how enemies can join, clarify, energize, improve, dismiss, twist, confuse, and divert conversations, as well as use social networks to achieve their strategy objectives. The use of bots to enhance the power of information operations was also highlighted. Bots can operate automatically on social media, enabling them to disseminate false information and sway public opinion on a vast scale. To keep the country safe, the article stresses how important it is for military leaders to understand these dangers and act against them.
In the end, the piece suggests that social cybersecurity should be studied from different fields and stresses how important it is to teach both the military and the public about how decentralized modern information environments are. It supports flexible rules that let people act in a decent way in the information space while still protecting people’s privacy. This piece helped me learn more about how cybersecurity is changing and how important social cybersecurity is to national defense. As technology keeps getting better, the battlefield will expand to include more and more people. We will need new tactics to protect society’s integrity.