The co-founder of an influential cybersecurity think tank believes that weaponization of major social media websites and search engines will lay the foundation for cyberwarfare on a scale unimaginable until now.

“The year 2020 is going to be a tug of war for the psychological core of the population, and it’s fair game,” said James Scott (pictured), co-founder and senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. “There are very few things that you believe in that you came up with yourself. The digital space expedites that process, and that’s dangerous because now it’s being weaponized.”

Scott visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) during the CyberConnect event in New York City this week. They discussed the rise of influence operations, including the use of social media channels to disseminate deceitful information as a major cybersecurity threat; how nation states and radical groups are using unprotected metadata; and growing concerns around what the 2020 election cycle may bring. (* Disclosure below.)

Last month, ICIT launched the Center for Cyber-Influence Operations Studies in response to the dissemination of “fake news” from nation states such as Russia and China. The pursuit of influence operations by foreign governments is becoming a growing, significant cybersecurity threat in tandem with technical exploits that breach infrastructures, according to Scott.

IT executives are targeted

The institute has already seen evidence that nation states are targeting information technology executives with elevated access privileges. Foreign governments gather metadata and inject analytics to develop a psychographic algorithm, which can then shape an innocuous-seeming contact, such as a recruiting pitch for a job.

“You can do anything with those guys; you can spearphish them,” said Scott, describing an approach where an executive can be targeted with an email from what appears to be a trusted source.

Nation states and radical terrorist groups are now using remote access trojans on the network to exploit unscrubbed metadata in real time. The ability to monitor usage on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook or search engines such as Google allows special interest organizations to build algorithms that can be used to recruit more followers.

The ICIT has seen evidence of this through the activity of the United Cyber Caliphate, a cyberhacking arm of ISIS. “The whole point of the Cyber Caliphate is to create awareness and instill the illusion of rampant xenophobia for recruiting,” Scott said.

The institute’s work and continued concern over the potential impact of foreign meddling in the 2016 election have renewed the focus among intelligence leaders for dealing with an even more significant problem in two years. “We’ve been asked repeatedly by the intelligence community since the elections last year to explain this new propaganda,” Scott said. “We’re getting hit by everybody, and 2020 I don’t even want to imagine.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and there’s more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the CyberConnect 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the CyberConnect 2017 conference. Neither Centrify Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: TheDigitalArtist/Pixabay