The ‘Perfect Storm’ of Disinformation and Hacking

Matt Tait gives a list of examples throughout history where politically motivated groups have used disinformation and hacking as part of a campaign to shape public opinion.

We live in an age of fake news, misinformation and disinformation. Recently, we have been falling for it – mostly. That is largely thanks to a confluence of social media, hacking and good old fashion disinformation campaigns, according to Matt “Pwn all the Things” Tait, a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Tait kicked off last week’s Kaspersky Lab Security Analyst Summit in Cancun, Mexico with a talk titled “A Brief History of Disinformation, and What to Do About It”. Threatpost caught up with Tait and asked him to breakdown his talk that covered the merging of hacking and disinformation campaigns tied to everything from the 2016 U.S. elections back to World War II and the Nazis.

Previously Tait worked at Google Project Zero and was a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence and security organization responsible for providing signals intelligence.

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