Not informed enough to know how realistic this is
Chris Vickery
*@VickerySec*
I'm a little hesitant to point out this next item, but we need to brainstorm defenses.
If you think the West has seen the power of combined foreign troll armies with domestic collaborators, take a seat. You haven't seen anything yet.
The selective omnichannel floods will come. Combined forces of domestic traitors calling targets and battalions of foreign warm-bodies clicking at gamified interfaces of war, simplified to the point that anyone capable of recognizing shapes and colors can contribute.
The low-learning automatons ("bots") will echo and amplify the actions taken by the human operators. Using bots symbiotically with human core teams (which imitate/improve/amplify/scale when the humans have a success) is more than enough firepower. Advanced AI is not necessary.
Armed with in-depth personal details and personality profiles for every citizen of the target country. Suddenly your phone number, address, first name, last name, and opt-in are populated on 500 go-back-to-college application forms. Your phone will not stop ringing for weeks.
Also your email inbox becomes useless. The faceless horde has millions and millions of reputed email accounts to send you seemingly individualized nonsensical emails that evade spam filters due to the adaptability of those amplification bots. Hundreds of emails per hour pour in.
Now the fun part begins. Utilizing video processing advancements (think along the lines of DeepFakes, Blender, and Photoshop), it seems the adversary is also sending out bombardments of convincingly-realistic pornography, featuring your face, to every person you've ever friended.
Wait a few minutes as the message spreads through the swarm that you're the target. Minimally maintained business entities tied to no one of real value suddenly start requesting your credit score. Over, and over, and over again... exploiting the fact that this tanks your score.
Now the "AI-Powered Voice Assistants" spin up. They sound real, they have convincing scripts, and people think they are real. These bots call your landlord, your boss, your neighbors, your friends, and anyone else that will listen to made up stories about you beating your wife.
And here's the kicker- You don't know why you are being targeted. You don't know who exactly the adversary is. That is part of the strategy. You were chosen to be targeted because an algorithm believes you are the right combination of destroyable with effective chain reactions.
You see, they don't need to target everyone. They only need to target the right people, with the right technique(s), at the right time to cause cascading failures which destroy you and everyone else within, or allied with, your nation.
That is one coming storm. We need defenses.