ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contextualize the role of cyber intrusion as a component element of information warfare in the age of the Internet. Despite the relative commonality of cyber conflict as a feature of world politics in the 21st century, few threats to national and international security have so completely captured the attention of practitioners, policymakers and scholars as has the specter of cyber-enabled influence operations targeting Western societies. Traditionally utilized as a framework for analyzing military operations, variations of the kill chain have been adopted as the most popular threat model for cybersecurity practitioners. Many cases of information warfare targeting democratic states involve the employment of cyber instruments of state power to support manipulative or disruptive activities achieved via use of, among other things, social media platforms. Scholarly work on the nexus of cyber and information operations has come to numerous initial conclusions about the role of digital intrusion as a force multiplier for Internet-enabled efforts to propagandize.
