Socialbots and the Challenges of Cyberspace Awareness

As security communities brace for the emerging social automation based threats, we examine the mechanisms of developing situation awareness in cyberspace and the governance issues that socialbots bring into this existing paradigm of cyber situation awareness. We point out that an organisation's situation awareness in cyberspace is a phenomena fundamentally distinct from the original conception of situation awareness, requiring continuous data exchange and knowledge management where the standard implementation mechanisms require significant policy attention in light of threats like malicious social automation. We conceptualise Cyberspace Awareness as a socio-technical phenomena with Syntactic, Semantic, and Operatic dimensions - each subject to a number of stressors which are exacerbated under social automation based threats. The paper contributes to the ideas of situational awareness in cyberspace, and characterises the challenges therein around tackling the increasingly social and often pervasive, automation in cyber threat environments

Developing Assessment Criteria for Security and Intelligence Cooperation in the EU

This report proposes a set of assessment criteria for security and intelligence cooperation at the EU level and presents the limits that prevent more effective cooperation in this field.The research team conducted interviews with experts and officials involved in this work, which lends the report rare insights into the area of security and intelligence cooperation.The working paper first provides a summary of the current institutional architecture and presents an analysis of the main bodies involved in the provision of analysis, early warning and situational awareness at the EU level, like the Satellite Centre, or the Intelligence and Situation Centre and the EU Military Staff Intelligence Directorate working under the Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity.Moreover, this paper discusses matters relating to the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) and their relationship with external security.Since cooperation in this field also occurs outside the EU institutional framework, it considers other relevant European frameworks on intelligence cooperation and cooperative agreements with non-EU actors