Cybersecurity's New Imperative: Strengthening The Mental Immune System

what I'm going to talk about Hi how are you wake up all right you're awake how many people are here Shah how many people wish they were here show of hands how many people think a show of hands is really [ __ ] stupid you okay my job for the next 40 minutes is to mess with your minds and show you some things that maybe you've never seen before maybe you've thought about a little bit but uh it's something that's facing us and it's a global crisis I approach it from the American view obviously because we got a little more trouble in this area than you do and it's called meta War cognitive Warfare lots of different

terminologies for it and uh it began with what I call my metanoia and I had my first idea when I was about four and it turned into ultimately what became Congressional testimony in the United States in 1990 where Congress said to me Mr schwow do you really believe the bad guys what use the internet now we have a new type of conflict coming along a new kind of conflict where it's about reality Distortion what is real what is true what makes it addictive and it's all about information and human beings ability to survive in an information environment which we are not built to do it's the art and science of distorting and manipulating your reality your

belief systems and I'm going to show you some of the techniques that are used and a little bit of the history and then a model that I've used to have an approach for the future of this I want you to read

this this was written in 1985 four coincidentally by Yodi bezmenov a former KGB propagandist who defected to the United States and wrote a book and I suggest you read it 80 Pages PDF free called My Love Letter to America and it's this for 80 Pages we were told we were warned what was going to happen and what we are seeing today is exactly the result of decades and Decades of us being told what's going to happen and US ignoring it so I got a question here and whoever gets it right gets a copy of this book unless you want to pay for it and I'll take your money how many private research study and experimental or similar projects

have been publicly funded in the UK and the EU throw out numbers whoever gets closest gets the book 350 who said 350 get your ass up [Music] [Applause] here the only reason he got it was the only one I could hear it's really somewhere in that depending upon how you look at the problem how you define it and whether it is academic or with lots of different questions but roughly in that area so now another book same question United States how many who said zero first come on [Applause] up we have been defunded in academic we have been threatened out of research since 2022 there is virtually no publicly funded Research into misinformation disinformation and ass sorted assorted

reality distortion Technologies in the United States for political reasons over here when I say over here I mean this side of the pond there's a fair amount going on and I've been very fortunate to get involved with a number of these groups in the last four or five years since I've been researching this topic but back in the US we have no National Security mandate none whatsoever for us to look at cognitive defense as a national security issue to we are not doing it for unfortunately largely political reasons and as a result and we've seen this and you've been watching the news for the last several years what level of cognitive defense would you give the United States

and its typical citizenry based upon reality Distortion I don't need that answer cuz zero is really darn close to the answer as well this is about our cognitive immune system we a biological immune system we have a physical immune system but we also have a cognitive immune system just like we have cyber immune systems yet thus far we are virt doing virtually nothing about it at the educational level at the Enterprise level or at the national level as a means of defense and it begins very simply with what I call the meta War thesis and it's a few simple steps ultimately The Meta any formation of information exchange is designed to influence your sense of

reality and the level of the immersive experience can be as simple as telling Plato I'm sorry a um Homer telling a story of Brave ulyses over a campfire beautiful Greek Knight he's telling the story people's eyes are closed and they're immersed in the story you are immersed in a story when you read a novel and suddenly the only reason you come out of that reality is to reach for a Coke or the bag of chips it's the only time you notice that you're shifting reality you don't know you're going into it because it's automatic part of our brain and once we have that that creates reality Distortion movies are reality distortion on purpose games are novels

are conversations are [ __ ] among hackers it's all a form of reality Distortion or trolling and it depends upon how much of it you are willing to actually buy into fundamental reason behind it all ignore disinformation ignore misinformation I'll show you why in a little bit the problem is too much information and we as carbon based Engineering Systems are incapable of handling it and we are seeing the results of it right now and once I've got TMI I then can use that for manipulation and once I have manipulation going what do I use nfts reward systems discounts these create addictions and the addictions are the dopamine and serotonin doses that we get in our

brains through the mere mere existence and coexistence with information systems once I have that and the addiction I then have compliance once I have compliance we've got belief this is how it's happening all around the world right now and why so many of us do not understand how some people can actually believe some of the crap that they're saying and believing regardless of what side of the aisle you're on on how do some people believe it well let's look at what immersion is really what is immersive experience well could be Star Trek holc oh that's great uh could be three body problem that's the epitome of what we hope to get to one day or some people

hope we get to one day but this has actually existed since the beginning of humanity this was the first story ever told story of the great hunt and they took down whatever kind of wild beast that was and it communicated to our predecessors what happened then we had some writing now how much of the kinea form writing is [ __ ] or it's real I'm I'm not qualified to say but it was used as an information exchange and a mechanism for communication and that immersed people into the believability of the how many goats you have how many bushels of wheat you've got this became truth and belief and accuracy for that element of society H then Along Comes Gutenberg in order to

propagate the Bible was the first purpose of it and bring written information to the unwashed masses and what did we do with that we did this with it we did yellow journalism in the United States H how many newspapers were in London at the end of the 19th century 40 50 I mean some insane number and most of them were crap well that we had exactly the same thing and uh if Hillary I'm not going to go there but the first time that we actually put technology in the path was in 1876 first telephone where human to human communication had a technological medium in between the transmitting human and the receiving human at that point and

we've heard this over the years all the phone companies supposed to do is move the bits back and forth and not get involved in the content that was the nature of big Tech is that what big Tech is doing today quite clearly big Tech is creating huge amounts of influence in the nature and the content of the communication then Along Comes video we get immersed in video and this is where peep shows came from so regardless of what they're watching it was a very simple visual technology no audio at all and that didn't come for another few years when we had Nickelodeons and mass consumption of visual and auditory information then we had movie theaters

first movie theaters came about roughly 1920 and then Jazz Singer Warner Brothers 1927 blam it's all about who we don't need silence anymore we need talkis cuz people get more involved in it so the old adage who would ever want to hear an actor talk was history in a matter of three or four years then radio radio changed everything suddenly you had the means of information exchange you had the means of proliferation of truth falsehoods beliefs agendas whatever it would be and what what was the most successful [ __ ] campaign in the history of radio who knows yeah that's it he gets [Applause] it one guy one voice One microphone monophonic one speaker convinced thousands of Americans to grab

their guns we have guns if You' haven't heard to go out and shoot the aliens and it was all under the name of theatrics long comes TV now we get more and more quality and we get more and more quality more and more immersion you're sitting at home with a large screen TV watching Avatar something really cool maybe and you don't know that you are part of the experience until you grab your Coke or chips when you step back and suddenly realize you're in your living room and then you m and suddenly you're back in if it's a good story you're back into it but you don't see you're not aware of the transition in your mind from this

objective Collective agreed upon hallucination into whatever the narrative you're being told is you only know it when you get pulled out of it sort of like anesthesia everybody's had anesthesia once or twice right and you're kind away where did I go I only counted from hundreds 90 you're not aware of that one but you are aware of the other one of returning to this reality this there's one of these downstairs it really cool they make me sick because of the latency and technical issues with them but a lot of people love this stuff and it is highly highly immersive has anybody ever experienced any of these where you are on the platforms and you are part and parcel of

a full 3d experience from which it is sometimes hard to escape and often you'll have the bodysuits that'll give you the kinetic feedback as well to further enhance the belief bability of the experience I've tried these I've gotten sicker and a dog on them I think one gentleman here in the audience has been to the sphere Las Vegas anybody been to the sphere it's a 2.3 billion sound system that's incredible the visuals though are not terribly good but this is the state-of-the-art that we have it right now for Mass consumption large audiences in a single uh communication environment and then Apple two years ago a year and a half now came out with this patent if you haven't read it go take a

look it's going to be the next generation or a couple Generations on of earpods earbuds 38 biometric biological sensors what does that mean that means that apple the application whatever it is that is coming through the earbuds will know how you are reacting to metal to Joanie Mitchell wed Zeppelin they're going to know your emotional reaction to every bit of auditory input that comes in and you're feeding it back to Apple and to Spotify and to all of the others for what purpose back to the meta War thesis with addiction the addiction for more and more because I'm going to feed you exactly what you already like and want why should I change that if you're

giving me money this is real this is also real these are completely new isolated chambers that do the kinetics do the feedback do the biof feedback and put the body into the equivalent of a weightless state do they work perfectly yet no they work convincingly yes the entire issue is how believable is it and how believable is it when we can have perhaps shared hallucinations how many of you are familiar that right now the technology is existing to share dreams it's already being developed it's been proven in the laboratory that you and I can go to sleep together with the right accoutrements of technology and we will share the same dream and we will come out of that dream with a shared

experience this is part of meta War this is part of where we're going but it's all in your head right but isn't everything in your head whether it is that's agreed upon hallucination or an individual immersive experience just you and the content what's the difference it is all in your head it's how can I manipulate it for my purposes and my goals so we're going to have to do a little bit of engineering here and I started looking at this whole thing well this is really nuts this is this is bad what are we going to do about it and I started because I'm a cyber security guy decided to look at it from a pure engineering standpoint and

said how does the human work well our entire reality everything that you see everything our agreed upon Hallucination is created with 11.1 megabits per second of information like a shitty MP3 file that creates our objective reality that's all it takes the rest of it is a time delay inside the brain catching up with memories that may only be 300 milliseconds old and gluing it together to create a reality that we can agree on we can disagree on but this is it we may not see I'm color blind so we're going to see things a little bit differently but fundamentally a wall ceiling floor we can agree on 11.1 megabits creates your reality anybody can check up on the

numbers I know this is small however I'll be happy to give you the slides this is the engineering specifications for reality Creation in your brain through our sensory systems that's all it is it's not terribly complicated we've got five primary senses three other sort of senses and this these are the numbers now if I know the numbers what does that allow me to do as a bad guy as somebody who wishes to manipulate your behavior your belief systems that gives me a huge amount of power especially when I put in the feedback loop and the feedback loop gives me eye tracking body tracking face tracking biological tracking of my senses when I have all of those tracking

mechanisms feeding back to the controller whether it's AI or just a hunk of software it doesn't matter when they respond based upon my physical reactions my mental reactions who's in control of my behavior at that point do you remain in control or how much have you consciously or unconsciously given up to the technology because always remember he who controls the technology controls the narrative regardless politics religion your boss work or Hillary and her alien baby and what we are learning how to do very very well is program your emotions using these exact techniques uh Quick Pitch here all of the details on this are in that book by the way and I'm not going to sell it to you but I do

want you to buy a million copies it's hey I'm honest but it's all about how can I alter your emotions as part of the manipulation of your belief systems and your belief in information so folks cyber security people as we move forward yeah this sound kind of might sound a little like social engineering some might say social engineering on steroids and I'm not sure I have a real good term for it but this is your new attack surface that is the attack surface that we have been dealing with well we go back to Yodi bezman off's work we go back to the bolik revolution where much of this work was pioneered because they took the work of William James the

pioneering psychologist that applied it for propaganda in the early bolic days nothing is new and where are we going with all of this Tech technology on the left is an image of somebody looking at a cute little kitten on the right is the brain scan of the person looking at the cute little kitten how many of you want that in your earbuds this is the technology that is Real This was done by meta thus meta War this is real when we can do this from 5 MERS when we can do this from 10 m when we can do this from 100 m what happens to that feedback loop that helps control and mediate your behavior when it's done at a

distance technology for that is not quite here yet but undoubtedly we are getting there we were not built to survive this we were built to survive lions and tigers and bears oh my and don't drink the dirty water and if the food smells like it's rotting it probably is don't eat it and it took us 50,000 years of evolution to learn how to identify what not to do but starting I used the 1956 is the beginning of the infation age and the reason I do that is that's when the first five megab hard drive was delivered by IBM that's a decent enough but we can argue later at the bar if you want another date but what we've discovered since

then is the disconnects between that technology that we are creating and have been creating and the human being himself this is how we view technology various to varying degrees this is roughly what we think the kids all Wanted for free we did hacking back in the day cuz we didn't want to pay for phones we didn't want to pay for anything either but this is fundamentally how people tend to and I I'm referring to the uh just folks around that are not would not be at a conference like this this is how they view it now what happens is we have to get to a little bit of Neuroscience and understand what's really going on inside of this engine

inside of the engine and this work was a pioneered by William James back in the 1890s he called it the conscious and unconscious mind today with the work of philosopher Daniel common it's now referred to system one and system two system one is that highpe reaction somebody punches you and you automatically punch him back you hear a horn on the on the street downstairs and you either do this or you do you do something in order to react to that threat to your survival then we have system two which is the conscious process thinking citation evaluation but the 100 million to one is what is really interesting here our system one that gut reaction survival

mechanism that is built into us we process between 32 20 and 400 billion bits per second fair enough that keeps all the bits and pieces running our conscious mind runs between two and four kilobits our subconscious unconscious mind is a 100 million times faster and that is what ends up making Humanity when we see some of the crazy it's because they are living and responding to system one and not engaging system 2 because system 2 is not about life and death in the jungle survival for us it's another kind of survival which is information survival because our survival we're familiar with uh fight or flight and all that and here are the six FS for who we

are this is all that it is and so we've got the four ones that are event oriented then the two biological imperatives of course when the other f is feeding and mating these are the imperatives this is all we have but when we build in technology into this mon into this model we also see the human and technological technological relationships we all have little bits of this sometimes we love the tech and sometimes oh [ __ ] I hate it unplug it go away I'm just going to go to the bar and be done with it this is how we are trying to learn how to coexist so I've taken these ideas and said how can we start at least

thinking about conquering dealing with learning to coexist with the technology that we've created and it's more about coexistence because I you hear the AI scares they're going to take over well yeah some of them have been pretty nasty so far are we ever going to be able to control AI that's another argument entirely but what we need is a huge amount of help huge amount of help and that requires disciplines from all areas policy makers Tech technicians neuroscientists experimental psychologists on Down the Line none of which I'm qualified to talk about but cyber security and infrastructure protection are two areas of cognitive defense one being this part of the cognitive defense system and the other being the bits and pieces that are

gluing all the hardware and software together to create this new reality for us so how can we map some of these against what we know well in our world we have Doss and dos is what too much information that's all it is same thing one is carbon based one is silicon based dos same thing in today's world TMI too much information comes from multiple sources versus a single Source exact parallel to what we're going through with cyber the same thing is occurring to us cognitively and that creates a signal to noise ratio problem how much of the signal is valuable old audio recordings and they scratch and they sound like hell cuz the signal to noise ratio is

pretty bad in your own brain how much of the input that you absorb and is the environment that surrounds you how much of it is signal and how much of it is noise you're going to have to start making these kinds of decisions in order to be able to survive the information onslaughts do we have firewalls well cyber does do we have firewalls and it turns out out that the cognitive immune system does have a firewall we have levels of defense that we have not exploited to and fine-tuned to the level that they need to be in a world with entirely too much information but it does exist and it can exist does not naturally exist in system one Access

Control list firewalls with a lot more granularity can we do that yeah we can do we do it naturally Engineers do scientists do some Educators critical thinkers do but by and large MPA on the streets these concepts are Way Beyond what they're used to dealing with on a day-to-day basis all right we have antivirus antipathogen in biological terms what about mental pathogens how many mental pathogens are we exposed to on a daily basis that's part of of TMI too much information coming from however many different sources there are but how does that filtering occur so that the TMI becomes usable that we can lower the signal to noise ratio do we have the proper detection and reaction

mechanisms like we do in cyber do we have them for the mental cognitive system do we have them for our mental immune system because our mental immune system is the one that was never trained over the last 50,000 years of our existence system pathogens same argument that we've had defense in depth biologically we have defense and depth cognitively we have the capability of doing defense and depth in the ways that we would speak the language is it an exact parallel no but it's close enough to get us on the path to doing some research and figuring out how the cyber security Community can help figure out what we need to do trust we deal with zero trust levels how much

do you trust him I don't trust him for [ __ ] after he didn't tell me the stairs were here trust how much does your cognitive system Trust natively only you can answer that right now and then we've got the trust factors the factors is there absolute Trust of one is there zero in fact zero trust or is it all probabilistic somewhere in the middle my argument from analog Network securi it's somewhere in the middle pausing I have a five and a halfy old grandson and he goes and I go calm down count to 10 in English or Spanish I don't care which calm down or the little girl you may have seen this on YouTube it's a

little girl she's so she opens the door to outside slams the door and starts screaming to the woods about 10 seconds later she comes back and says I feel better now all that is is the pause taking a moment to engage system 2 from your system one natural characteristics that we have reputation that goes back to trust reputation engines we use them right now can that technology can that be exploited can it be used repurposed for cognitive defense that's what the cyber security Community can do a tremendous amount work with self-healing well we've got some self-healing networks now various levels we have really good self-healing biological systems but what about self-healing mental immunity once you've been convinced of

something and you believe something can that be healed or are you so biased and so locked into one of the 100 plus biases that we as human automatically have that were built into us and from the very beginning as survival mechanism they do not naturally translate into the world we're living in today time based everything is time based computers technology operates what a million times faster than us 10 million times pick a number doesn't matter they say oh we're going to improve the reaction time of the driver well you'll improve it from 280 milliseconds to 220 milliseconds is that going to make a difference when you're having a cognitive battle with a piece of technology no the defense in depth the

defense of the cognitive system has to be somewhere else and degrading degrading trust when you plug in the firewall you never have to patch it you never have to update it you never have to fix it because it's always I cannot read what the hell that says no five minutes I'm not done so we have exactly we have the same thing so few years ago we don't know enough right The Matrix for how this actually works is all based upon one thing too much information and it ties into our huge amount of disconnects Stress and Anxiety we have none of that today right and where does it all come from a lot of it comes from our natural

inability to deal with too much information behavioral algorithms when we are exposed and talked to people about it they go I don't want anybody telling me what to do well you went to Walmart didn't you you're out there buying you're listening to TV you're listening to advertising this is all part of Behavioral algorithms it all creates part of that addiction and what is going to replace pii personally identifiable information which will be useless in a few years be piib personally identifiable Behavior based upon the stimulus to your senses and that feedback mechanism through the udal loops that will tell the source of the information how you react to it exactly when we compare the symptoms and

the output what we can do about it again it's going from what we're doing in our world to what we're doing in technical World policy world oh that that's the 1956 computer by the way when the misinformation susceptibility test uh experiments were run out of Cambridge University fascinating results came out is that the vast majority of people that were easily fooled tended to be those that already had preconceived conservative Notions their openness had been closed off by other mechanisms within their brain and hardened the biases within them the studies from Mesker show clearly how too much information is the natural source of misinformation disinformation [ __ ] lies and manipulation and this study is only two

years old and when you add Ai and bots on top of it it only gets worse and when we look at the super spreaders of this type of technology and Mal information for lack of any other word again the conservative affiliation to this type of abuse is well documented through psychological research and studies largely here in in Europe Stress and Anxiety what can we do about that well we all to some extent do this I've seen the men at the down at the urinals here none of you can lie because we've all done it when we get into behavioral algorithms that's what's running our lives and so far we seem to be okay with that we add in Ai and we're going to

we're going to trust AI but not one AI person will ever be able to Define what is neutral what is fair what is equal for all we can never Define it it's going to be a pendulum swinging forever and then what happens when AI gets pissed off inside of your own little ecosystem abuse of privacy where that's where we are going to have to do a huge amount in building out not only the cognitive systems but building out the technical systems that are going to be building web3 whatever term you want to use for it because the Privacy factor of your Behavior you as a unique individual this will be more unique than your DNA or your

fingerprints and it will be continuously upgraded the more often you are plugged in digital addiction I don't have time to go through all the things that can be done but be aware every time your 8-year-old daughter clicks on like she is being given a digital opioid boost how many of you would give a six-month-old a pacifier Laden with cocaine yet we give the kids phones and tablets that have the feedback mechanisms in them that create the addiction and in this case it's digital opioid addiction that ties back into personally identifiable behavior and anxiety what do we do well real simple answer is cut the loop remove the like button remember the old days on bbs's

you didn't get like buttons you either got flamed or you had a conversation you didn't have this mess all the kids in the schools running around you didn't like what I said out you're supposed to feel bad and 38% of kids in the United States right now are clinically depressed but it's not Technology's fault at all is it and then time these things are so much faster than us how can we ever compete with them and it means redesigning the infrastructure redesigning the infrastructure by cyber security people and cognitive experts to be able to take into account that we have a carbon based system interfacing with a silicon based system yet we're not designing it in any

way to compensate for the control of those systems over us first step in all of this is I do I give a [ __ ] everybody starts talking about Miss no misinformation that's a political hot button disinformation political hot button too much information is not a political hot button it's just a raw piece of data that we can all agree on but it's called critical ignoring unless I know how to ignore the vast amount of bull that's out there that's coming my way how can I even begin to make a any sort of critical evaluation of the situation the information whatever it may be and critical ignoring is a process and this process can be

brought about partially through cyb birth partially through Behavior partially through ux and UI interfaces in order to get the system one to engage system 2 with that little bit of app pause and this is what it's about this is one of the first steps that the data has shown us proven from research leading out of Cambridge University university of Netherlands uh Stanford Washington until those were shut down by the US government we know that this is the process process pause how do you pause we know how to make things pause we've known this for 130 years of psychological research What It Takes how do we do it in our environment that's what you guys are

partially needed for how can we introduce pausing playing a game always does an incredible job at this and the latest research that came out two months ago out of Cambridge who's done so much of the fundamental Research into this says gamification of cognit cognitive process will strengthen the human mental immune system the numbers exist and it goes back to anti-b brainwashing work after World War II and the theories of the inoculation Theory mental inoculation Theory by James Maguire came out initially in 1961 and remained hidden until Sander van Lindon and a couple of Dutch researchers discovered it again in 2013 and now it's being used think of pre-b buunk pre- buunk when you argue with somebody of another

belief you can't debunk it you're not going to move them you're not going to move them intellectually you're not going to move them emotionally is like walking into a wall at 100 miles an hour pre-b is a mechanism to get people to tune their own mental immune system with a little layer of defense and depth and it turns out that the numbers and the studies that were done with over 4 million people one game takes seven minutes when after the game you are re-evaluated your susceptibility has gone down 51% the numbers exist does it require periodic tuning periodic tuning that's what the Decay curves I talked about earlier for absolutely you have to keep riding the

bicycle you have to keep driving you have to keep I I use the ski and you got to ski in order because the body memory and the mental memory are all part of these things I started off with this the threat we've known about it for 130 years 1984 it was handed over to the US government and intelligence services from a KGB Defector 80 page handbook on how to screw over the West step by step this is what we're going to have to learn how to do coexist trust nothing and verify twice because with TMI you don't know anymore and this is why we need hackers why we need the cyber security Community to actively get involved in getting our

carbon systems and our silicon systems to begin to coexist so we are not made extinct thank you very much for your time

and I apologize for no I don't apologize for [ __ ] I'm sorry I don't know if there's time for questions or I'm being thrown out um so I think we maybe have time for one or two if we're quick I think we're well I I see one here shout it out so I can hear okay [Music] so much louder I'm I'm okay so you present all of these techniques for training people to deal with um basically all of this misinformation and disinformation how do you deal with the subset of people who are not interested in that okay how do you de are not interested um there are several groups of people uh one of the things I said

very early on was for Enterprise in Enterprise much of this could be done through under the uh umbrella of security awareness training without having you don't have to train people uh initially initially it is pure gamification and pre-b to be able to get people to Auto just kind of fine-tune their own pause button a little bit after that when we talk about bias and we talk about fallacies and we talk about critical thinking that requires another that requires people to care the other place that it works phenomenally well is an education uh The Finnish educational system is teaching uh disinformation misinformation and detection reaction mechanisms to toddlers through analysis of fairy tales we have the ability so educate

number one Enterprise number two and I have some proposals that are in the book as to what could be done at the national level uh the issue that I face in America is I don't think this is going to go over terribly well and that's one of the reasons I've spent so much time uh working on this over in the UK and EU but it's not one there's no Silver Bullet like we say in cyber there is no Silver Bullet it is a process that we need need to understand and we need to integrate between the carbon and silicon systems for our survival I think that wraps us up so just want to say thanks wi and uh share

your appreciate