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The Amygdala, Cyberwar, and You
From: Dave Aitel <dave.aitel () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2020 13:25:49 -0400
Humans, like other hominids, are giant machines for social status relationships processing, which you're going to be reminded of every time Google news suggests some article on TMZ with people you ostensibly don't know, but enough forced exposure has convinced you they are *in your extended family*. I mean, this also explains the rise and fall of Facebook and Insta-Influencers and so much more about the modern techno-dystopia. There's some great biology on it, like this <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299878225_Evolution_of_Primate_Social_Systems> amazing paper on Bayesian inference of primate social structure (a must read, for the methodology if nothing else), or any of the online videos <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA> or books <https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078> by Robert Sapolsky (he does a whole series on human sexuality that is *riveting*). Obviously one side benefit of our built-in drive to record all our meals so other hominids know we can find high-calorie food is we now have actual *history*. At some level, everything pre-Facebook/Google Drive/iPhone was prehistory in the exact same way people used to use the term for before there was writing. Humans, of course, are the most hominid-like hominid, and hence nearly everything we do is about rank. Do you play Overwatch? What's your SR? Do you do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu? What's your belt? Do you have a cyber-warfare team? What's their...some metric nobody at INFILTRATE would agree with. But also because hominids have stupidly huge sections of their brain oriented around tribal status calculations, rankings in cyber war are as complex as anything else and it's all anyone seems to care about. In Overwatch, or BJJ, maybe ten percent of the people you interact with are actually "smurfing", which means deliberately presenting a public persona of under-ranking themselves so they can fool around and troll everyone else. But in cyberwar *smurfing* is the majority strategy! Because the better you are, the less you get caught, and the less people know about your actual skill level. This is most amusing when you travel to Japan, the country where your every physical interaction is with some emissary technology from the far future but discussions about offensive cyber operations are met with the literal shrug emoji. It's equally amusing when talking to Middle East policy experts who assume Saudi Arabia will be helpless in offensive cyber without Western technology (c.f. NSO), even though a hundred amazing comprehensive courses for learning how to do Penetration Testing existed even before COVID-19 and now there are a thousand. The difference between a professional offensive cyber operator and an amateur is not so much technical skill as restraint, and what I see in a lot of places is so much restraint it can only be interpreted as intentional smurfing. This is something we should really be taking into account when producing strategic plans like the Cyberspace Solarium is doing. -dave
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- The Amygdala, Cyberwar, and You Dave Aitel (Apr 27)