COUNTERING CYBERHACKTIVISM
The Department of Defense University Consortium for Cybersecurity (U2C) and the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. (UMD START) are partnering to better understand how cyber hacktivism spreads as a social contagion. This work seeks to partner with Defense and government agencies on identifying, mitigating, and countering cyber hacktivist campaigns.
Hacktivism is an emerging threat combining cyber hacking and activism using techniques to target public and private organizations seeking to disrupt operations and achieve symbolic, espionage, or cyber warfare outcomes. Hacktivism can surge during periods of conflict and combine state, state-sponsored, and independent non-state actors targeting critical infrastructure, financial institutions, and other physical and cyber targets.
Although hacktivism is new, the concept of social contagions spreading harmful activity is not. The partnership is leveraging previous work at UMD START by Dr. Timothy Clancy on the terror contagion hypothesis, which looked at how certain kinds of public mass killings (e.g., school shootings, vehicular terrorism, etc.) are spread through social contagions on social media, content platforms, and messaging apps leading to replication over years and decades. This work already includes models, computer simulation, and profiling research.
To kick off the effort, U2C, and UMD START are seeking out DoD and other government partners who may:
- Have practical experiences to share in cyber hacktivism.
- May be called upon to mitigate or confront future cyber hacktivist attacks.
- Want to learn how computer simulations and modeling can be used to better understand complex threats like cyber hacktivism and whether these techniques can be used in their organization.
- Wish to participate in group model building and/or test computer simulations modeling cyber hacktivist campaigns.