Building High Trust Networks in a Low Trust World
The world has undergone profound social and technological upheaval in this decade, a seismic shift driven by an overwhelming wave of change. The dramatic transition to remote work during the pandemic hastened an already existing trend, carrying many of the spaces where we organize and cultivate our networks along with it. The rapid proliferation of these online civic spaces has also triggered efforts to regulate them, resulting in an escalation of censorship and surveillance targeting dissenting voices. As governments adopt more authoritarian stances and tighten their grip, trust in institutions has plummeted, casting a shadow of constant social unrest across many corners of the globe. Online criminal activities have flourished, ranging from minor theft to holding entire electrical grids to ransom. The frontlines of war are no longer restricted to physical territory.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, we’ve also borne witness the emergence of powerful Artificial Intelligence models capable of generating startlingly convincing text and images. The widespread availability and accessibility of these tools have been touted as a paradigm shift in the way we communicate, both with each other and with technology itself. While there have been extensive discussions (both written and generated) on the potential ramifications of these advances, the discourse has predominantly gravitated towards utopian and dystopian extremes. Some extol the virtues of a world bathed in Fully-Automated Luxury Communism, while others prophesise a cataclysmic showdown with Robot Overlords. Few have actually analyzed what the technology is capable of doing today and what this means for change makers.
This series, which aims to address these concerns, was born out of an exercise conducted with one of our clients which set out to answer to the question: “What are the practical security implications of AI for non-profit organizations?”. The revelations that followed were not only startling but also unveiled a number of key insights into human behavior that we aim to share in the coming weeks.
The first installment, “Weapon of Choice”, is a primer on why Social Engineering is the most successful of all digital security exploits, accounting for up to 98% of cyber-attacks, and how AI is poised to make things even worse.
In the second part of the series, “The Converging Threat of Social Engineering and AI,” we will delve into the arrival of universally accessible LLMs (Large Language Models) such as ChatGPT and how they pose a profound threat to the safety and privacy of change makers.
Navigating through the shadows, “Dark Basin: A Case Study,” examines a real-world “hack-for-hire” phishing campaign where we were afforded an unprecedented view into the methods used by the attacker.
The fourth part will present a case study of a recently conducted phishing simulation using publicly accessible AI tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. Through this straightforward experiment, we uncovered a significant revelation: the efficiency of the heuristics we’ve developed to identify Social Engineering attempts will face substantial challenges from AI-driven tactics.
The fifth part will explain how all of this fits together with Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic vision of a hyper-connected world, where the choice of medium is more important than the message you send through it. As our real world networks increasingly converge with, and become indistinguishable from computer networks, we will have to master new cognitive skills to safely navigate them.
In the sixth installment of our series, we delve into a comprehensive examination of the communication tools, or mediums, through which our messages are conveyed. Our investigation encompasses not only the technical capabilities inherent in these platforms but also delves into the strategies by which they can be exploited for Social Engineering objectives.
The seventh and final part explores what it means to build networks in an age when anonymity, bots, AI, and Social Engineering are all redefining the essence of connection. We explore various strategies for engaging and mobilizing supporters online and how we can make sure the person we’re talking to is not just who they say they are, but are actually a person at all.
We’re extremely excited to be sharing these insights with the wider community and hope you’ll continue to join us on this journey by subscribing below. If you’d like to find out how CTM can help your organization make sense of a changing world, you can reach us here.
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