White Paper Information Threats

July 28, 2020

Key findings

• The identity of a society and the economic growth of liberal democracies are dependent on the authenticity, stability, and integrity of information, databases, and digital identities.

• The information space of liberal democracies is changing due to (1) rapid technological developments and (2) the erosion of people’s trust in facts and scientific findings.

• Geopolitical conflicts are increasingly staged in the information space. Information warfare destabilizes information spaces around the world.

• Information threats can’t be stopped by deleting accounts. Their architects will continuously search for ways to use the functionality and business models of relevant internet services for their own purposes. It is a daily competition between the attackers and the attacked, and the victor will be the side that has the best mastery of technology.

• The attribution of information threats is a substantial challenge. In the future, AI-enabled applications in speech and text processing, as well as in image processing, will remove the individual fingerprints of those that create information threats even as the threats are created. This will make reliable attribution even more difficult.

Recommendations

• The development of an understanding of the phenomena, risks, and dangers of threats to the information spaces of liberal democracies, free economic systems, and global political developments is one of the key competencies of policymakers in politics, society, and the economy.

• The development of appropriate measures to make people aware of threats in the information space.

• The implementation of a process for educating the target audiences of active information operations. An informed public is a resilient public. The more quickly the narrative, images, and goals of active information operations are known, the lower the odds that they will spread.

• Companies and organizational IT infrastructures that are secured according to industry standards, as well as multi-factor authentication for online accounts, contribute to the protection and authenticity of information, databases, and digital identities.

• Development of appropriate measures to enable people to recognize, process, and classify information from texts, images, videos, and feeds in a dynamic information space in the long term.

• Newsrooms need a shared code of ethics regarding covering information threats.

Downloads