Malware of the Mind - Disinformation and Manipulation via Social Platforms

Mike Manrod opens by describing how he began connecting malware with disinformation after a long flight in 2015, when he noticed that the way false information moves through people resembles how attackers move through a compromised system. He treats software as expressed ideas and malware as a bad idea packaged in a format machines can run.

The middle of the talk turns to human cognition as the target. Drawing on research into cognitive dissonance, conformity, heuristics and biases, and the limits of group size, he argues that people carry exploitable weaknesses such as fast, fear-driven reactions, trust, and conditioning. He maps these onto vulnerabilities and privilege escalation through emotional triggers, and explains how social platforms give a bad idea a reach that a local pub never could. He then sketches a disinformation kill chain: defining objectives, building accounts and infrastructure, mapping a target audience's fears, delivering content, and tuning the campaign based on its results.

He closes by suggesting where the chain could be broken. Options include sharing threat intelligence, platform-level disruption of fake accounts, personal integrity checks that pause to question strong emotional reactions, and filtering information sources. The talk is largely conceptual, presented as a set of thought experiments rather than a tested model, and it leaves room for audience questions on the topic.