We are having some technical problems. That was the most amazing presentation that has ever existed. You have to use your imaginations that it was the best presentation, ever! It might pop up in any shape or form. If it does, it can be a glitch. It might pop up, but it might not be the real one in here. Otherwise there might be a bluesgr Horweg Te здесь. We might get started because there's a break after this and I need to go to the bathroom and get food. I will hand over to Susan very, very shortly. She is going to be talking about social media, the new court of public opinion, exploring the effects of social media on our unconscious bias. I have just spoken to her because I've just been looking on Twitter and she has been involved in pretty much every single event in Las Vegas over the past few days. She's been volunteering at B-side, she was over at the Diana initiative. She's been doing pretty much everything and this is the last thing on her agenda. So without further ado, I will hand over. As I said, if her screen does pop up, just give her a quick nod or a wave to be like, yeah, slide to working. Otherwise, I'll hand over to her right now. Thanks very much. Thank you so much. So I know I'm between you guys on a break so I will make this a short. Luckily this is only a 20 minute presentation. Like Jen just said, I'm going to be speaking with you on social media and the new court of public opinion and how it affects our unconscious bias. So I did have a wonderful disclaimer slide that said that any information delivered is just my own opinions and views and not my employers. And everything I found via OSINT and it is unclassified and I also try to stay as nonpartisan as possible. So there would have been another slide of me and that's basically saying that I've had 14 years of experience in cyber security focused primarily in threat intelligence. I most recently was the cyber threat intelligence lead consultant at Booz Allen and I founded CTI programs at a couple of different agencies including US Postal Service for the Government of UAE and for the US courts. And I am involved in a ton of different organizations. So one of them being I am the founder of Beside Sacramento and we are having our first event this year which is going to be awesome. Women's Cyber Jetsu, Mental Health Hackers, EC Council, Sian's Purple Team Summit. If you guys have questions about any of these then just let me know afterwards we can have a talk and connect. So to get started on the topic at hand, the court of public opinion was originally something that everybody is generally familiar with. It's innocent and proven guilty which is technically our standard. Originally a judge decides what evidence to allow an jury appears to decide upon a verdict and personal feelings, outside knowledge, pressures from friends and family expressly should not factor into this verdict at all. Legal cases are not meant to be argued outside of the courtroom or decided on gut or bias but with the informal court of public opinion that has arose it's operated parallel to our legal system for decades. And this term is used to describe how both sides of an issue using media in general and the influence of public opinion in turn affects the jurors and ultimately the verdict. So courts are well aware of this issue and jurors are generally selected very carefully and sometimes even isolated to try to avoid the influence of public opinion on their verdict. So how has social media changed this? Previously the court of public opinion referred to using the news media to influence which was standard radio and television and those were the biggest concerns. The new court of public opinion is not just the news media but also social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter and Reddit etc. 62% of US adults said that they get their news off of social media now versus watching the nightly news. Social media platforms such as Facebook have dramatically given a different structure than previous media technologies and the content can be relayed amongst users with no significant third party filtering fact checking or editorial judgment which is our biggest concern. So there was a wonderful slide that showed a bunch of different statistics about the different platforms. Mainly Facebook which is the biggest social media site around with more than 2.2 billion people using it every month and that's two thirds of the world's population. There are more than 65 million businesses using Facebook pages and more than 6 million advertisers actively promoting their businesses on Facebook. There was a recent study which collected data about users in the US mostly because that's where Facebook's biggest lucrative market is. It found an estimated 15 million fewer people are now using Facebook today than they did in 2017 which is the biggest drop seen amongst teen users and millennials. That is primarily because they are moving to a different platform and if you want to guess what it is it's Instagram and that's ironic because Facebook owns Instagram. There's also YouTube with 1.9 billion monthly average users and that's obviously you guys know the video platform sharing where you can watch billions of hours of video every day. Twitter which I think is the favorite among the hacker and infoset community and it's social media site for news, entertainment, sports, politics, everything. What makes Twitter different from most other media sites, social media sites is that there's a strong emphasis on real time information, things that are happening right now and it's happening 280 characters at a time. There's also Reddit which is known as the front page of the internet and it's a platform where we can submit questions, links, images. There's the subreddits which are dedicated forums pretty much anything under the sun and those are the deeper, more detailed areas of engagement. It's anonymous so there's free license to be yourself and it is very rarely policed. Each platform has its unique and distinctive qualities and each play a role in telling a news story. So I was going to shift for a moment and talk about something a little bit more fictional and there was again going to be an amazing slide about Harry Potter. So hopefully most of the people in this room have heard of Harry Potter or have released red and watched the first book. So I'm going to have you recall the first quidditch match where he was on his Nimbus 2000 and it started acting very strange and was trying to knock him off. Meanwhile Hermione noticed Professor Snape was muttering with his eyes fixed on the Gryffindor seeker and being Hermione she put two and two together. She was well read about curses and every other type of subject for that matter and she thought Snape was jinxing the broom and ran to Harry's rescue with her fiery spell. So what Hermione did was distract the real culprit as she sneaked up on Snape. The troop came out that it was Professor Quirrell instead and he admitted to Harry that he had jinxed the broom and claimed that he would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling counter curses. In other words Snape tried to save Harry's life and only things he got was being set on fire. But why was it automatically an assumption that Snape was doing something malicious towards Harry and it's just because of his character. He was the Hogwarts Potion Master, he was the head of the Slytherin House and a former Death Eater and he seemed to hold a grudge against Harry. But it was really Professor Quirrell and we didn't suspect him because he came across as this feeble timid and full of nerves kind of guy. He stuttered and stammered his way through conversations and his nerves were so pronounced that it was rumored his turban was stuffed full of garlic to ward off vampires. And why did this happen? Like why did this occur? Why did nobody think it was him? And in one word it was bias. So to shift back to the non-fiction to everyday life and everyday we see images from the media to provoke reactions. But we don't usually know the full story before coming to those conclusions. It can easily be a case of he said or she said and with the truth being out there and we don't really know what to believe. It's on us to do the research and try to find both sides of the story and make an educated opinion about it at that point in time. How you perceive things, your general outlook basically determines your actions. A perspective distorted by biases cannot lead to sound decision making and this is where cyber comes in. But first a real world example that happened. It was from earlier this year in April of this year. There was a Monday afternoon and the police in Bourbonsville of West Virginia had reported on Facebook that a woman called 911 and told dispatchers that a strange man had tried to grab her five-year-old daughter while at the local shopping mall. The woman told them that she had scared the stranger away by pulling out her gun and when the officers showed up on the scene a short time later they spotted a man in the food court that fit this description and he was prominently arrested then. Hundreds of people reacted to the post on Facebook that the police posted and praised the young mother's vigilance and quick-thinking warning others to be on the lookout for what would be human traffickers at the West Virginia mall. But less than 24 hours later, Mohamed Zain, 54, he was from Alexandria, Egypt, was booked into jail on a felony attempted abduction charge and the panic inducing story started falling apart. The officers returned to the mall Tuesday morning and found no witnesses that were able to collaborate with her account of what happened. She then admitted that the more she thought about it she realized that it might have just been a cultural misunderstanding and the suspect would have just been probably patting her daughter on the head and smiling versus trying to abduct her. By Thursday the prosecutors had dropped all charges against Zain and he was an engineer working on a contract job there and he had actually just gone to Old Navy to pick up some clothes for his own five-year-old daughter. Ultimately they found no evidence and he wasn't even near the girl at the time. Officials often speculate that the tales about attempted child abductions on social media may be to blame which have the tendency of going viral despite the lack of evidence behind them. So that was just one example in a local news media. I did have a picture of the, and hopefully you guys have seen this picture, but the MAGA kid, Nick Sandman, where he's faced with the Native American beating the drum and he has this very smug expression on his face. So if you had seen the picture, it was to see that initial reaction that everybody had to it, this massive demonization that happened of the MAGA kid for the crime of smirking essentially. And it turned out later that the students who had arrived in DC to participate in the March for Life had been waiting for the bus and they were being verbally attacked by a whole another set of group of people.  The Covington students then responded in turn and tried to drown out the hecklers with school chance of Cove, Cath is the best. That's when the Philips, the Native American man, considered that things were getting too ugly and decided to intervene. And he led his Indigenous Peoples March, which he was participating in at the same time, to divide the students and the other group while singing a tribal song and beating on his drum. And at some point in time he faced Nick Sandman and this picture was taken. And it was all over the news and everybody had these incredible reactions, especially all over Twitter. And there were meltdowns over his expression claiming that it represented bigotry and white privilege and there were calls for his expulsion and planned on killing any future career that he might have aspired to. Upon some reflection of this event some pointed out the startling parallels to George Orwell's 1984, which citizens were persecuted for committing quote unquote face crime. Even after the video footage proved that the Native American Nathan Philips walked straight into the middle of the group of Covington high school students and was not mobbed by them as media had claimed Sandman had still been crucified for smirking during the encounter. So I would have been remissed if I hadn't mentioned the elections, especially since we are coming up on election season. And again my slides would have shown how in the 2016 elections with Clinton versus Trump there was a lot of the fake news that was coming out and many people would see fake news reports and believe them. The most discussed fake news stories were usually in favor of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. And a number of commentators have suggested that Trump would not have been elected president if there hadn't been the influence of fake news. And one of these stories that I found most intriguing was PizzaGate, and I don't know if you guys heard about this one, but basically it stemmed from a WikiLeaks release, a WikiLeaks release, that's hard to say, of John Podesta's emails which were wildly misinterpreted where Edgar Welch drove from his hometown in Salisbury, North Carolina to Comic-Ping-Pong in a northern part of Washington, D.C. and he was armed with three guns and he had the plan to free the children that were being held in the basement in a child abuse scheme led by Hillary Clinton. There was no basement at Comic-Ping-Pong and there were no children to free and all he ended up being successful in was frightening employees and patrons who ran in a panic, obviously, and ruining the owner's reputation and his business was tainted by the conspiracy. So this keys into fearmongering, which is the act of deliberately arousing public fear or alarm for a particular issue. Social media's influence on our thoughts can key into this term of fearmongering. So how do we develop the discernment to understand what is actually true? Discernment is an inner knowing source from genuine truth while judgment is sourced in fear. Discernment is a spark of intuitive knowledge, an inner voice of principle and certainly one that aligns with our path, purpose and inspiration. Judgment is about control and uses fear and manipulation as a means to gain it. So what is the psychology behind this? What is the scientific study of mind and behavior that is behind all of this? So one thing about social media is that we are able to curate our community and we are able to reinforce our beliefs then because we usually select who we follow and who we friend and who we connect with. And so how we get to select our social media community and curate our own news feeds usually filled with those with similar outlooks just possibly could encourage and solidify our own personal views. So we just have to be cognizant of the fact that we might not be seeing both sides of the story. So I pointed out three of my favorite biases that I found I came into contact with the most. The first one being confirmation bias and that's one of the most common. It's the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypothesis. This is a bias we seek to interpret new information as a way to confirm our current views as well as discounting data or views that contradict or perhaps an alternative to our views. We see this in information security when executives believe that technology can provide the most of their defenses and they look at successes these devices have but perhaps ignore the shortcomings and therefore inflate the real effectiveness of these tools. So the other one that I was going to mention is the Dunning Kruger effect and that is coming from perhaps over confidence. So when we're doing analysis it's something that we have to be very, very careful of. Dunning Kruger is basically where, and this comes in a little bit with fake news too, where you learn a little bit of something and you have this very high over-inflated sense of I know everything about it. I am the master, I am the expert and being in cyber security we hear that term a lot. I'm the expert. Luckily we have a lot of people who will challenge us and that's great. If we do that because we always can learn more then there's that moment where the curve will dip and again you would have seen a curve where the curve will dip and you realize you probably don't know as much as you thought you did and then you go and research and learn some more and then you equalize that curve. So that's Dunning Kruger. And then we had the halo and horn effect which is a tendency to allow one's judgment of another person especially in a job interview to be duly influenced by unfavorable meaning the horn or the favorable halo first impression based on somebody's appearance maybe. Their halo horn effect is a cognitive bias that causes the interview to unfairly balance one trait either good or bad causing this to overshadow the other traits and not look at the whole person perhaps and this is just in the interview case. The mirror because you are like me and I am like you or the opposite effect I don't like you because you are not like me takes place with the halo horn effect as well. Then there would have been a very big eyesore of every single cognitive bias in one infograph and there are just dozens upon dozens that you would have seen. And I was going to point out just a few that I have seen and perhaps give real world examples of how we might see them in our security operations. So the first one being anchoring bias. When you first buy your computer you especially like back in the day you were told or found that you needed an antivirus and 10 or 20 years later you probably still believe that antivirus is the only solution maybe not the people in this room to keep your computer safe. But this is where anchoring bias would be in action. It's relying too much on that first piece of information and how it will affect you going forward. I think I'm done so I'm getting away from the back of the room but there was only one more slide and it was just basically a challenge to you guys. Make sure that your decisions are not based on bias. Develop that self awareness and monitor your own self discernment. Personal responsibility for your actions and judgments and challenge and counteract biases if you see them in your security operations center. So there are dangers of one sided stories. Just be very aware of that. Again how you perceive your outlook determines your actions a perspective can be distorted by biases and it is not sound decision making then. So I apologize for the slides and the technical difficulties. I will not stand between you in a break again and thank you for coming to my TED talk.


The following is a production of New Mexico State University. The cornerstone of McPhee Hall, affectionately referred to as Old Main, is all the remains of the first structure built on the present site of New Mexico State University. Prior to its construction, High Room Hadley taught classes in a downtown Adobe building that was the home of Las Cruces College founded in 1888. Upon receiving legislative funding, the name was changed to New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. The land was bought in 1889 and in September of the following year, the cornerstone of McPhee Hall was set. Old Main served dutifully for two decades until the fateful night of September 12, 1910 when a fire brought it to the ground in a matter of hours, thus ending an era. For the early years, I'm Carla Aragon. This was a Centennial Minute from New Mexico State University. The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University. The views and opinions in this program are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.