Methodological Foundation of State’s Information Security in Social Networking Services in Conditions of Hybrid War

Abstract

At the present stage of the development of information technologies, social networking services have become a leading means of mass communication with a significant impact on all spheres of public activity. Thanks to its popularity and communication benefits, social networking services are used by leading nations to achieve their own geopolitical goals. Through information operations in social networking services, one can spread manifestations of hostility on national, religious, or ethnic grounds, and thus increase the level of social tension, dissatisfaction with the existing system of governance, etc. That may have further consequences in real social and political life, with the subsequent transition to chaotic social dynamic. Therefore, the provision of state information security in social networking services in the conditions of globalization of the information space and hybridization of military conflicts remains one of the most pressing problems not only for Ukraine, but globally. This article analyses the peculiarities of the use of social networking services during the hybrid war with the Russian Federation. It was established that the counterpart party carried out information operations using social bots, informational and information-psychological influence on the actors of virtual communities. In addition to these actions, operations involved actors with the task to enhance the impact of negatory material and destructive propaganda. The authors then elaborate methodological principles of providing information security of the state in social networking services by implementing procedures for detection, assessment and countering threats in the information space. Effectiveness of the proposed methodological principles is achieved by developing timely measures to identify and assess threats, using the natural peculiarities of the interaction of actors in social networking services for the synthesis of controlling influence and artificially managed transition to a definite stable state of information security of the state.

Counteraction to information influence in social networking services by means of fuzzy logic system

“…In particular, it can lead to mass protests of citizens, the radicalization of the society based on religious, ethnic, national and political grounds. The examples of "Colorful Revolutions" in the CIS together with "The Arab Spring" in the Middle East and North Africa demonstrate that achieving a reduction in the level of radicalization of society using existing legal mechanisms is a very challenging task [14][15][16]. In most cases, such events led not only to civil protests but also to the overthrow of governments, their change, civil wars and armed conflicts.…”

“…The most effective way to counteract the chaos of society is the timely detection of information operations in SNSs, which are conducted by the opposing party. Methods of identifying and assessing threats to information security of the state should be applied in such cases [14].…”

The conceptual model of information confrontation of virtual communities in social networking services

“…Under current conditions, the advantage in the state's information space is gained due to the high speed of content distribution in SNS, which has a destructive information impact on actors, as well as the decentralized nature of the links between them. As a result, SNS are an effective and efficient online platform for conducting offensive actions in the national information space of the state [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Therefore, at the present stage of the development of information technologies and the formation of the information society, SNS has become a source of threats to the information security of the state.…”

“…Analysis of recent research and publications has shown that, at the present stage of technology development, the hybrid war is being run without the use of military capabilities and weapons in the classical sense [7,10,15,16]. Due to the use of SNS, information confrontation becomes latent, has no clear beginning and end, and, as a result, the cross-border interaction between actors in SNS, the borders of states become vague.…”

“…It is known from publications [7,10,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] that mathematical models which take into account the redistribution of different types of resources necessary for its realization are used to study the processes of information confrontation. Among the known models of war, the most common model is the Lanchester model [17][18][19], which envisages the quantitative dynamics of the battle of two groups as a random Markov process with discrete states and continuous time.…”