Social Engineering the Future Battlefield

Social Engineering the Future Battlefield

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17769718_sEnav Galili, the founder of TVK Strategies Online, spoke at the ISOC-IL conference about the way Social Engineering will change the battlefield of the future.

Social engineering, sociologically speaking, means psychological manipulation in its ancient definition. In today’s terms it suggests technological innovation as applied to other concepts describing how we grasp people, and how we use social engineering to ‘engineer’ people.  According to Galili, social engineering is a rather easy process since we, as human beings, have many ‘bugs’. One of those ‘bugs’ is found in our decision making process since we are mostly irrational. Galili adds that human curiosity, naivety, and greediness are also considered as human bugs in the 21st century.  However, they are likely to be reduced in the future allowing us to better face our failures.

Social engineering uses pretext and phishing in order to manipulate people which can have both negative and positive aspects.  In the positive way it is used by companies to get information they could not have otherwise received.

Galili emphasized that Google only covers 28 percent of what is happening in the cyber space while the remaining 72 percent is covered in what is called ‘the deep web’.  The deep web is where you can find exposed and unsecured personal data on people and all you need is the knowledge to do so. This knowledge said Galili can also be used negatively.

Human kind believes Galili, is going through singularity where we are constantly changing and updating ourselves. This type of change in the human mind will have a direct effect on the future battlefield.  The five elements of war, according to Galili are: The C5I= Command, Control, Communications, Computers collaboration and the Intelligence battlefield. These changes will occur on three levels: the state level, the organization level and in the individual level.

On the individual level we will be programmed. We will be able to store our memories on a hard drive, and our biological system and computer systems will be joined together.  At the state level it means that the state will be able to change people’s mind set in mass. The state would be able to have direct influence on the mentality of people both individually as well as in groups. For an army, it can be used as a new form of psychological warfare, as a means of terrorizing and frightening the enemy. This process   can also have an effect in commercial applications as well where it can be used by companies to convince customers to buy their product or service.