The December 2016 “Grizzly Steppe” joint analysis report issued by the FBI and DHS provided a table of monikers attributable to various Russian cybercriminal organizations serving the state’s intelligence services. However, understanding what these names refer to is a challenge in and of itself. As noted by Florian Roth in a 2018 Medium article, similarities in names do not necessarily indicate a shared meaning, but are more likely attributable to a cybersecurity firm’s naming scheme.

Humans are more connected now than ever before. However, half the global population is behind on the digital revolution and there is great regional disparity in the availability of affordable Internet. While reports show a growth rate of one million new users a day from 2018-2019, approximately 3 billion people are still not connected. SpaceX, Softbank, Amazon, Google, Virgin, and Facebook are competing to close the gap and are racing to provide worldwide Internet infrastructure to rural and low-income areas. Harvard Business Review anticipates that within the next 3-5 years, “most of the planet will have some access to reliable, if somewhat expensive, broadband.”

Rama Polefka  at Black Mountain Dynamics noticed a trend a long time ago: Young companies need a robust, powerful, secure IT infrastructure.  But their founders are often so busy creating the company, the IT lags behind and compromises their growth. He has spent his career working with startups to grow their IT at exactly the right pace and with appropriately levels of cybersecurity included to help reduce cyber risk.

OODA is pleased to announce that our Future Proof conference will be held on March 19, 2020 in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

The Future Proof conference brings together the hackers, thinkers, strategists, disruptors, leaders, technologists, and creators with one foot in the future to discuss the most pressing issues of the day and provide insight into the ways technology is evolving.  Future Proof is not just about understanding the future, but developing the resiliency to thrive and survive in an age of exponential disruption. 

A recent RAND report looks at the role of information warfare and how targeted social media campaigns and similar approaches are deployed to cause damage to a state. RAND has coined the term “hostile social manipulation” to capture this phenomenon, which builds on familiar influence techniques including propaganda and disinformation. Hostile social manipulation is used to gain a competitive advantage by manipulating the political, social, and economic conditions in target countries through information channels. It targets beliefs and attitudes, not physical assets or military forces, allowing the activity to operate in a gray space that exists below the threshold of war.