A Medley of Memes
Welcome to Memetic Warfare. This week will be a rare case in which I point out a few interesting things and don’t dive in depth. We’ll be back to our usual programming in the coming week or two.
The first thing I want to point out is the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency’s latest textbook on “psychological defense”, available here.
The book is available for free, which is great, and it’s quite comprehensive. I haven’t read the whole thing, but it’s great to see a long-form resource made freely available, so good on Sweden here.
The next item is a now old-ish report from Graphika titled “Glass Onion”, focusing on a network of Chinese domains while interestingly posing as separate media outlets. Pretty straightforward but a nice look at this type of stuff, and it’s good to see Graphika publish occasionally again.
The next item is from infostealers.com, a great resource from Hudson Rock, a very interesting company focusing on infostealer data. The item focuses on documents found on a Hamas member’s computer, thanks to having been infected by an infostealer,
One of the documents, signed by a Hamas spokesman, found exposes the media strategy - coordinating rocket launches with its general media strategy:
We’ll conclude with a fascianting post, including rare field work, from NetAskari regarding Chinese APT groups, see below:
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading.
These tactics (coordinated media/rockets, fake outlets, psyops textbooks) amplify real-world effects, eroding trust and influencing policy. And Sweden's response shows states taking it seriously, which is pretty solid for a state to do so!
Overall, I do agree that we must treat online info as a battlefield where state/non-state actors weaponize leaks, reports, and memes to push narratives.