Releasing slides from the 2-day CogSec course

2-day CogSec course outline

The DISARM Foundation runs cognitive security training courses. I’ve just attended one as an observer, and can a) say that Stephen Campbell is an excellent teacher on how to use the DISARM frameworks and set up disinformation responses, and b) there are folks out there who can probably benefit from our earlier courses on cognitive security basics.

So here’s the outline and slideset from the 2-day course we gave at CanSecWest.

Course plan and links

The course has 10 main components across 2 days of teaching and exercises, with focus on 4 capabilities:

• Understand environment: 1 introduction, 2 information and response, 3 threats
• Set up project: 4 project setup, 5 data collection
• Manage components: 6 influence, 7 narratives, 8 behaviours
• Manage risk: 9 risk assessment, 10 risk prioritisation, 11 hotwash

It also has practical work on an example project of the students’ own choosing, with outputs:

• day 1: landscape assessment, report outline, and toolset
• day 2: influence, narrative, and behaviour tags, and control suggestions

Learning objectives

• Elaborate how information security and cognitive security interact
• Evaluate persuasive technology at different scales
• Evaluate influence operation mechanisms and tracking techniques
• Use tools to investigate account and network-level coordinated inauthentic activities
• Understand ethical behaviour around misinformation and disinformation response and research

Exercise Resources: Games

• The “try this now” list: Bad News Game, Harmony Square, Go Viral, News Hero, Cranky Uncle, Disinformation Diaries, Learn2Discern, Fakey
• Other games: Fake News: the game, Checkology misinformation practice,
  Polititruth (Politifact, Tinder-style), BBC iReporter, Digital Compass, The Republia Times, Interland, Propaganda Game, Factitious, Hindsight2020

Exercise Resources: Landscape Building

Information landscape

• facebook/twitter/mobile use: Datareportal.com
• Reuters digital news report
• Languages: wikipedia “languages in <countryname>”
  https://worldpopulationreview.com
  https://data.humdata.org

Response landscape

• Active responders: DISARM lists of groups and tools and map
• Larger groups: DFRlab, EuVsDisinfo
• Google searches

Harms landscape

• Disinformation incidents: OII 2020
• Websites: Mediabiasfactcheck
• Google searches, e.g. Country/cities + mis/disinformation

Activities

• DISARMs: Red and Blue
• Assessment questions: Cognitive Security ecosystem assessment

Good places to look for countries

• EuVsDisinfo — Russia disinfo on EU
• DFRlab — world disinfo
• OII — nationstate actors. Specifically The Global Disinformation Order and case studies — E.g. 2020, 2019.
• Newsguard — covid19 domains for several countries

Exercise Resources: Tools

Using these:

• Google Dorks
• TinEye
• TweetBeaver
• Social Media Analysis Toolkit (SMAT)
• Webmii
• Tweetdeck
• Hoaxy

Installing these:

• Jupyter
• Gephi
• TAGS
• Hypothes.is

Exercise Resources: Analysis

Tagged datasets:

• https://covidstates.org/ — covid19 data collected for USA
• https://github.com/jgolbeck/fakenews — Jen Golbeck’s tagged domain data
• https://github.com/KaiDMML/FakeNewsNet — tagged dataset
• https://github.com/compsocial/CREDBANK-data — early data, with topics
• https://commoncrawl.org/ extracts and saves text from domains

Exercise resources: gotchas

Gephi issue: “Data laboratory” tab is blank. Get round this by going to the very top menu, window -> data table