Author: Rich Drees / Source: The Inquisitr News

Many find it sad that we see so much Cold War rhetoric now in the age of technology, peace, and communication. With the recent headlines across major news outlets, that isn’t shocking. News has come from major networks about a massive Russian attack on our sovereignty, blatant hacks of our political organizations, and propaganda perpetuated online.

Advanced persistent threats, or APTs, are going to be the next buzzword you’ll be sure to see in headlines for the coming weeks as politicians accuse each other of corruption and general shenanigans. However, how concerned should we really be to the possibility of a social engineering trick from the Russian government? How much evidence does the FBI have that there are secretive ties between Trump and Putin?

According to the FBI, there are no clear links between Russia and Trump.

That information won’t motivate news companies enough to not push click-bait-driven headlines like “FBI Investigations into Trump-Russia ties yield little,” which clearly says something similar to the originating article but has heavy implications that disagree with the FBI’s assessment.

There is a substantial amount of misinformation and propaganda spewing out of both sides of the political aisle, but how hard is it to spoof the country of origin of any piece of content or a specific post on a forum or website?

The Twitter Trial and Growth Hacking Experiment

Meet GSA SER, a piece of German-made computer software designed for posting on a massive level. GSA SER is one of the most powerful applications in its space, and the software can be used to perform this type of trolling. It is perfectly legal to own and operate.

Gaslighting is defined as the act of psychologically manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity and reality. Gaslighting is executed through a variety of tactics, one of which is called “concern trolling.” Concern trolling is where a member of one group poses online as a member of another group and voices their concern over specific questions they need answered before they can fully dedicate themselves to the cause. In reality, they are already entirely opposed to the cause, and they are tricking other members into thinking critically about a specific subject.

Using GSA SER, you can scrape or collect hundreds of thousands of proxies. These are either openly shared lists of computers with open ports or an evolving list of peoples’ computers with open sockets and ports exposed to outside connections. These computers often require no passwords to connect to, and once you connect to them, everything you do through it appears as if it is coming from that computer’s location. Within minutes of installation, you can scrape thousands of open proxies within the Russian Federation, People’s Republic of China, and the United States of America. Some of these are operated by governments and are acting as honeypots. A honeypot is essentially a trap set up by a federal government. They know people will try connecting to it and will use it for illegal purposes. They can then easily track who originally connected to the proxy to hide their activity.

This is one way you can collect, find, and use proxies to hide or misdirect the source of information. With a little research, you can find sources to rent proxies from specific countries for only a few dollars per month. Here is one for Russian proxies, priced at less than $10 per month.

With this software, anyone can pump out as much content to a wide variety of sites, however, most of the sources it can post to are essentially devoid of human readers. How can someone push an idea into mainstream media or use giant social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to expose people to ideas and content they normally would ignore?

The Social Signal Fix

Unfortunately, this is also a rather simple problem to fix. Facebook, Twitter, and…

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