Small treatise about e-manipulation for honest people

Abstract

Information warfare is nowadays a well-known concept. However, articles are mainly split into two categories. The first one deals with how information must be managed in a system (e.g. a company or a state), in order to achieve information dominance, that is providing more and better information than the others so that they have to follow what is produced. The second one is more on how information can be used as a weapon. Dominance is one goal, but not the only one: deception, intoxication or misinformation are others. In this article, we chose the second approach. The goal when using information as a weapon is to influence a target so that it does what the attacker wants, or to cause effects. We chose also to focus on a specific battlefield: Internet. One particularly important aspect of the Internet is that it is both a container and contents. For instance, web sites are providing articles, but they are also some servers, referenced by search engines. As such, we combined this duality to increase the effects of the operations given as example. We illustrate the operation through examples, where both information is created, but also its container is improved. We show how Search Engine Optimization can be used for information warfare. Combining oriented action techniques and information based techniques make each of them much more efficient. This article shows how information warfare can be conducted on Internet. The goal is to illustrate how very few people can organize an information based attack, targeting either a company or a state for instance.