Building Resilience to Foreign Interference, Misinformation Activities

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published a series of documents as part of its efforts to address and build resilience to foreign interference, particularly information activities (e.g., disinformation and misinformation). The first document, The War on Pineapple: Understanding Foreign Interference in 5 Steps, is intended to illustrate how information operations have been carried out in the past to sow divisions in the U.S. The second document, Foreign Interference Taxonomy, addresses types of foreign interference operations in addition to information activities, which include traditional media abuse, new media abuse, and cyber activities. With the cyber activities category, CISA notes hacking may benefit information activities, assisting in surveillance or reconnaissance and providing opportunities for destructive attacks. The third document, Social Media Bots Overview, was previously published by DHS (and uploaded to the WaterISAC portal here). As discussed in this product, social media bots can provide a conduit for malicious cyber activity.