Over the past few years, Russia has proven itself to be an undeniable master of information operations. The techniques vary, but the majority of them focus on creating new realities and subverting Western values. This makes response efforts much more challenging, and Russia’s info ops strategies have become a key part of the arsenal the country draws upon in achieving its aims both at home and abroad.
By describing personal experience with a steady diet of state-sponsored propaganda while studying abroad in Russia, and by examining the country’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea as a case study, I will give you an in-depth look at Russia’s info ops and why they’re so effective. I will explain why it’s useful to frame Russian information operations as large-scale social engineering and the implications that has for mitigating the security problems involved.
Meagan Dunham Keim is a Russian language nerd and InfoSec enthusiast who studied Global Security and Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also an alumna of the Russian Flagship, which is an intensive language and cultural studies program with a study abroad component. During her Flagship capstone year in St. Petersburg, she studied political sociology with native Russian speakers. Keim has assisted in cyber incident response efforts at a non-profit organization where she successfully advocated for improved digital security measures. She is currently pursuing an M.S. in Cybersecurity Technology at the University of Maryland University College.