The Web Of Cognitive Warfare

The talk examines a state-linked influence campaign that combines narrative manipulation with cybercrime. The speaker, a threat hunter working with national and European partners, explains how the operation uses websites styled as local news, paid social media ads and fake comments from sockpuppet accounts, some of them built on compromised profiles, to funnel people into fraudulent investment platforms. Victims who lose money are then targeted again by fake police and fake investigators who ask for personal data, which the operators can use to build profiles of the population.

The middle section covers how the activity was measured. Advertising library data was pulled through an API and processed with sentiment analysis, name recognition and topic modelling to separate genuine political advertising from manipulation. Advertiser identifiers embedded in the scam sites were used to cluster related domains, and network scanning revealed a shared server cluster across several European countries. Exposed control panels with weak passwords and poor input validation were also found, and sending malformed data into the operators' systems was reported to disrupt their data models.

The closing part stresses that these methods can be reused in other countries, that defenders should map techniques and share evidence with authorities, and that individuals are vulnerable to these tactics too, so awareness of personal biases matters.