Last Updated 2024-09-14
Welcome to the Netwar Irregulars Bulletin v2.0, a site about the online aspect of 21st century conflict, both “operations technical” and “operations psychological”, as the Russians refer to hard cyber and information operations. This Substack is meant for company grade officers and NCOs working with the groups of irregulars that make up the foot soldiers in the battles taking place on today’s hostile, fragmented internet.
I’ve never served in our military or our intelligence agencies, I’ve been learning on the job with social movements since 2009. Having a computer science education, having held the Cisco Certified Network & Design Professional ratings, as well as owning a couple wireless ISPs, I have some technology skills. Having written for House, Senate, and Gubernatorial candidates, as well as three years of ghost writing a cryptocurrency column in Forbes, I have a sense of how influence campaigns work.
Starting in early 2021 my trend has been more time observing, reading about, and writing in this area, rather than participating. The content here is loosely modeled on curriculum development. I will pick an area of interest, a set of quality writings about it, and then spend time exploring the space. There have been three thus far:
September 2023 - a sort of boot camp, meant to help develop skills with the tools needed to operate safely.
4th Quarter 2023 - using The Online Operation Kill Chain as a basic, we considered this from the aspect of a small ISR node characterizing and interdicting malign influence.
1st Quarter 2024 - loosely focused on PANOPTIC, short for Pattern and Action Nomenclature Of Privacy Threats In Context, a MITRE privacy oriented framework. We’re going to keep coming back to this one when I find material.
2nd Quarter 2024 - for the Malign Influence Operations Safari we got access to a fancy new tool set in the form of Semrush/SEOQuake, and we also explored some high profile leaks.
3rd Quarter 2024 - We’ll be covering the Snivel War, working the long tail of MIOS investigations, and Tailscale is an epochal change in how networking is done.
There are three additional newsletters that are basically reference material.
Tool Time with IIB contains videos of me demonstrating various software while describing the real life use cases. This gets updated when ever I catch myself doing something that others might have a hard time mastering without a few hints. I do take questions from subscribers and create videos to answer them. I post a periodic Tool Time Review that contains a catalog of the posts so people don’t have to dig through the archive to find them.
Disinfodrome is a reference for using our Open Semantic Search systems. The demo at oss.disinfodro.me holds about 15,000 documents ranging from the Senate’s 2016 Active Measures report to the results of the January 6th investigation. All of the OSS systems are protected with Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access, if you want to see the demo you’ll need to email me so I can add you, my first name at my last name dot net is best.
Geocyber was meant to be some hints on where cyber stuff was going to happen due to geopolitics, but it’s turned more into “geopolitical news that is influencing my thinking” with frequent dashes of “this geopolitical thing affects the internet in the following ways”.
I’m happy to hear from all of you privately - questions, comments, criticism, have at it …
