The best known effort of this type is the work of the first-ever Arabic Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group: Desert Falcons. CNA incidents mainly focus on hacking GoE websites and defacing them with political messages, whereas CNE incidents mainly focus on information gathering (data mining) and spear phishing on social media websites to identify and target Egyptian Army and Police personnel and their families, thus threatening their Personal Security (PERSEC), and overall Operation Security (OPSEC). The second trend to emerge is the rise in Computer Network Attack (CNA) and Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) incidents. Egyptian politics have been reduced to massive astroturfing campaigns, scripted by creative content developers and mobilized by marketing strategists, who create and drive talking points using meat and sock puppets, mask them as organic interactions between digital grassroots activists, amplify them in the echo chambers of social media, then pass them along to mainstream media outlets, which use them to pressure the GoE citing ‘public opinion’ thus, empowering their client special interest groups in this ‘digital political conflict’. Media outlets and think tanks seem to primarily cater to their owners’ or donors’ agendas.

The first is repeated deployment of large-scale, structured campaigns of online disinformation by all political actors, foreign and domestic, competing for dominance in the political arena.

Three disturbing trends have since emerged. National Security Situation: Response to offensive Information Operations in cyberspace against the Government of Egypt (GoE).Īuthor and / or Article Point of View: This article discusses a scenario where the GoE tasks an Interagency Special Task Force (ISTF) with formulating a framework for operating in cyberspace against emergent threats to Egyptian national security.īackground: In 2011, a popular uprising that relied mainly on the Internet and social media websites to organize protests and disseminate white, grey and black propaganda against the Mubarak administration of the GoE, culminated in former President Mubarak stepping down after three decades in power. (Author’s Note - “Do You Have A Flag?” is a reference to the Eddie Izzard sketch of the same name.) Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group. Al-Asqalani is an open-source intelligence analyst based in Cairo, Egypt.

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