Cybersecurity Issues, Hybrid Threats and Social Networks

Dear Colleagues,

As our lives become more and more digital, cybersecurity is becoming more fundamental. In fact, in a world where every company is a software company, as the CEO of Microsoft repeats, and many commercial and social interactions are mediated by information and communication technology, ICT, trusted infrastructures and trusted personal devices to access these infrastructures are fundamental to interact with our friends, our partners, and social and political institution in a safe way that also preserves our privacy.

Cybersecurity challenges to secure our ICT infrastructures are complex mostly because they sit at the intersection of three domains namely the technological, the legal, and the social one. In particular, the social domain plays a dual role because not only social interactions play a role in cyberattacks but also because the results, the impact, of these attacks target this domain. Important examples are ransomware attacks where a malicious agent exploits technological weaknesses, aka vulnerabilities, to penetrate an ITC infrastructure and control its nodes. When controlling a node, the attacker can destroy all its information or encrypt it and reveal the decryption key only after the payment of a ransom. This attack has become popular also because of laws that legalize cryptocurrency like bitcoin or other currencies with stronger anonymity properties. Furthermore, attackers exploit phishing emails to convince users to click on some malicious link and download malware to penetrate the system. Hence, each of the three domains contributes to the spreading of these attacks and, consequently, to the exponential increase of the amount of ransom. Besides financial impact, ransomware have strong social impacts as well and they range from the unavailability of health services when hospitals are attacker to the manipulation of evoting infrastructure or to the leaking of information on habits and preferences of persons. A further confirmation is the large debate on contact tracing and exposure notification applications that most countries have adopted to contain the current pandemic. It is trivial to understand that the social impact of information leaking from these applications ranges from social stigma to ransom or stalking.  The public sector is particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks due to a patchwork of outdated technology and operating systems across healthcare, education, local and central government. 

The social engineering techniques underlying phishing emails has resulted in a highly debated social issue, namely the spreading of fake news and of deep fakes. By fully exploiting ICT technology and advanced social engineering techniques, the spreading of fake news, mostly when integrated with bots, shows that cyber operations have important impacts and destabilizing effects on humans and societies rather than on machines and data. The wide adoption of bots confirms that the social domain is the kingdom of hybrid threats that integrate both social and technological strategies. Discovering and containing the spreading of fake news is critical for almost any social issue as confirmed by the debate that is delaying the vaccination and helping the spreading.

Taking into account the technological, legal, and social domains, the special issue focuses on security and resilience challenges and it is interested in papers that address at least one of the domains but with a preference for those that investigate topics at the intersection of domains.

Prof. Dr. Fabrizio Baiardi
Dr. Laura Ricci
Guest Editors

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• cybersecurity issues
• hybrid threats
• social networks
• cyber attacks
• vulnerability
• weakness
• social engineering
• robustness
• resilience
• network cascade