Risk and Realitywith Dr. Franco Oboni
International Risk Assessment & Mitigation Strategies Consultant
foboni@riskope.com
www.riskope.com
Riskope Risk and Crisis Management Blog: http://foboni.wordpress.com/
www.slideshares.net/foboni
www.youtube.com/foboni
Note: We at TNNW are delighted to welcome Dr. Franco Oboni, a highly-regarded international risk assessment and management consultant, as our newest Featured Columnist. Dr. Oboni's Featured Column is titled RISK AND REALITY. We urge you to read Dr. Oboni every month.
___________________________________________
INFORMATION WARFARE (IW) RISK MANAGEMENT
There are two ways to look at Information Warfare (IW) Risk Management: the good one and the bad one (too see definitions of Risk Management and other risk/hazard/crisis technical glossary refer to Riskope web site)
The good one encompasses good thinking and planning, i.e. proper management of the informational risks, the bad one goes into premature acquisition of technical solutions, hardware and “magic gear”.
First of all let’s look at the reality of things: does IW exist? Could an Information Warfare attack hit you as an individual, or your company? Sure it does and it could hit regardless of the size of your organization: there are even schools that teach it, addressing corporate needs; and it has been abundantly used in recent armed conflicts. Examples exist of law firms that have been attacked to discredit them and the rest is easy to imagine in these days of Facebook and Twitter attacks, global networking.
Remember, though, IW encompasses all sorts of strategies and tactics, including good old propaganda, image attacks, brain washing etc.
Thus the reply to the simple question: is IW at the exclusive reach of highly skilled programmers and hackers? Is as easy and clear: with minimal study and efforts anyone can implement an IW offensive and start a campaign against a corporation or an individual on a private of professional basis, on a network of friends etc.
Riskope International was asked by a European army to perform an IW risk assessment as a first step to the implementation of a national IW Risk Management approach. More specifically we were asked how much should be invested by an hostile party to obtain with a certain likelihood a certain damage level to a country (i.e. exactly to think as the bad guys and define the best options to obtain maximum damage with the least effort). We were asked to stay away from hacking or technical procedures, as the military are well equipped in those areas, but rather to examine other ways to inflict damage from an information risk point of view. Obviously, we found out there is a very fine line between IW and good old propaganda, as defined from WW-I on to nowadays, but as information vectors have evolved, deployment tactics should change, and indeed have changed.
But more importantly our study changed the view on:
1. what objectives can be achieved,
2. what damage can be brought to an organization, and
3. what it takes to get there.
Amazingly, during the study, an attack on Italian Civil Protection, perpetrated by a unidentified group, showed that our conclusions closely matched reality.
Finally, looking at what kind of Risk Management action you can implement, it becomes apparent that filtering and properly fusing information in order to trigger timely (immediate) and pertinent response seems to be the way. Recent documented examples in industry have shown how true this statement is.
IW missions for corporate/private clients should be geared towards helping clients to detect informational vulnerabilities, finding how easy it is to “fake” or distort information, how “colorful and vivid” the distorted information would be…and finally how that information can be brought to self-amplify and infect the informational environment of the corporation/private.
Once clear filtering and fusing criteria have been selected, time comes to start thinking about gearing up…not before that, the penalty being a significant waste of mitigative investments and most likely no protection at all.
####
Labels and Key Terms: : blogs and credibility, crisis, decisionmaking, Dr. Franco Oboni, enterprises, facebook, Franco Oboni, identity theft, information, making hard choices, marketing, risk, twitter, warfare, world affairs, media, communications, risk identification, risk assessment, Riskope, The National Networker, risk mitigation, RISK AND REALITY,
Please click here for more information on Franco.
Published by THE NATIONAL NETWORKER Newsletter. All rights reserved. Subscribe Free - Click HERE.
The National Networker Companies
Forward/Share This Article With Colleagues And Social Media:
No comments:
Post a Comment