[Dailydave] The Amygdala, Cyberwar, and You

[Dave Aitel]

Humans, like other hominids, are giant machines for social status
relationships processing, which you're going to be reminded of every time
Google news suggests some article on TMZ with people you ostensibly don't
know, but enough forced exposure has convinced you they are *in your
extended family*. I mean, this also explains the rise and fall of Facebook
and Insta-Influencers and so much more about the modern techno-dystopia.
There's some great biology on it, like this
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299878225_Evolution_of_Primate_Social_Systems>
amazing paper on Bayesian inference of primate social structure (a must
read, for the methodology if nothing else), or any of the online videos
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA> or books
<https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078> by
Robert Sapolsky (he does a whole series on human sexuality that is
*riveting*).

Obviously one side benefit of our built-in drive to record all our meals so
other hominids know we can find high-calorie food is we now have actual
*history*. At some level, everything pre-Facebook/Google Drive/iPhone was
prehistory in the exact same way people used to use the term for before
there was writing.

Humans, of course, are the most hominid-like hominid, and hence
nearly everything we do is about rank. Do you play Overwatch? What's your
SR? Do you do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu? What's your belt? Do you have a
cyber-warfare team? What's their...some metric nobody at INFILTRATE would
agree with.

But also because hominids have stupidly huge sections of their brain
oriented around tribal status calculations, rankings in cyber war are as
complex as anything else and it's all anyone seems to care about. In
Overwatch, or BJJ, maybe ten percent of the people you interact with are
actually "smurfing", which means deliberately presenting a public persona
of under-ranking themselves so they can fool around and troll everyone
else.

But in cyberwar *smurfing* is the majority strategy! Because the better you
are, the less you get caught, and the less people know about your actual
skill level. This is most amusing when you travel to Japan, the country
where your every physical interaction is with some emissary technology from
the far future but discussions about offensive cyber operations are met
with the literal shrug emoji. It's equally amusing when talking to Middle
East policy experts who assume Saudi Arabia will be helpless in offensive
cyber without Western technology (c.f. NSO), even though a hundred amazing
comprehensive courses for learning how to do Penetration Testing existed
even before COVID-19 and now there are a thousand.

The difference between a professional offensive cyber operator and an
amateur is not so much technical skill as restraint, and what I see in a
lot of places is so much restraint it can only be interpreted as
intentional smurfing. This is something we should really be taking into
account when producing strategic plans like the Cyberspace Solarium is
doing.

-dave
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