Regarding Those Kremlin Trolls

A couple months ago someone close to me cornered me and demanded to know why I had not yet read The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money. I had been hearing about the Kremlin’s “operations psychological” for a couple of years, but it took Crimea to make it urgent enough to warrant an afternoon of effort.

I read the document, reread it, paying careful attention to the last few pages of prescriptions, and then after a little thought I dispatched it to OSINT godfather Robert David Steele, who made it available in early December of 2015. (2022-11-05 it should be noted that this was my final interaction with Steele. He developed the habit of declaring on a weekly basis that some notable event was a false flag. It was only shortly before he died (2021-08-29) that I learned his change in attitude came via a visit to Russia and falling in with the Qanon ringleaders.)

Neal Rauhauser: Russian Information Operations The Menace of Unreality – How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money

Starting in May of 2016 I involved myself in the ongoing brawl on LinkedIn regarding Kremlin disinformation and its purveyors. We really need a proper reputation economics system there, as is it’s just too hard to discredit compromised outlets like Angelique Rockas and her various sock puppets.

Hand to hand combat is useful from the cyberweapon systems designer’s perspective as there is no substitute for some personal experience to go with the feedback collected from others working in the environment. The top level systemic backing means there are untouchable paid outlets, even more so than in domestic U.S. issues, but the ‘close quarters’ Twitter stuff is more topical rather than top level strategic. You can find those involved in Crimea, or Georgia, or worrying over the East Baltic Russian Influence; tactical level stuff, not strategic.

So, this class of problem has interested me, to the point that starting three years ago I have built and field tested what has become a small unit C4ISR system using mostly FOSS tools or COTS tools with zero entry cost.

The Netwar Forward Controller is a central system that accumulates timestamped text data from Twitter, Jabber, IRC, and there is a Telegram integration happening this summer. Advanced search, social/topical/general network analysis, and the ability to integrate things like computational linguistic processing are present. Analyst methods and workload grew in an insurgent environment rather than a structured hierarchy, and as such the system flows in the same fashion.

The Netwar Forward Observer is a suite of recommendations for consumer grade mobile smart devices, hardened workstations for the analyst/director role, and several prescriptions for actors or observers. Adversary Resistant Computing and Adversary Resistant Networking feature prominently, keeping mechanics and armorers in the rear where they belong, and freeing those making contact from needing a hacker’s skill set in addition to the task specific requirements.

This project has languished as I’ve found myself cringing at some of the entities that expressed interest. What the Kremlin is doing is such a pernicious hazard I’m willing to be a lot less dainty about countering it.

There are a mixed bag of people who are checked out to use this thing. Some are fellow hackers or researchers, but there are a handful of people who’ve done service in intelligence or special forces that have made the grade. We’ve going to congregate in the Netwar Systems LinkedIn group. This is probably the first and last public post on this.

So there. Now I’m a cyberweapons purveyor on top of my other dubious accomplishments.