We attended Jenny Reich’s session early Monday morning at the RSA Conference. She talked about how social media and other emerging cyberthreats challenge the principles and practice of national security.

Key takeaways:

• The internet and consumer technologies have created non-traditional threat actors that challenge existing national security paradigms. Aligned with this is the outsized role that private sector firms have in redefining national security.
• There is little regulatory oversight of social media. Given its growing role in national security, this will need to change.
• There are many current cyberthreats across social media platforms to national security, e.g., spycraft, information chaos, digital authoritarianism, etc.
• There are new and emerging threats that we don’t fully understand yet, e.g., magnification, subversion, opening the floodgates, etc. See mind map above for further details on this.

Thanks to @Jenny Reich for an informative session that gave much to think about at the start of RSAC 2024.