The Week in Malwords
Americans are more concerned about consequences of cyberattack than nuclear attack, by a factor of 1.5 to 1.
Cyberwar in Russo-Ukraine theater can easily spill over into apocalyptic outages against civilian populations in Europe and America.
Putin is not moral, but not insane. Has full control of his faculties, unlike many in US government and media.
Truckers and convoys losing ground as they grow, potential indicator of government action and need to evaluate strategy.
Pride goeth before a fall:
After reaching an all-time high of 1205.6 WPM in January, King COVID has plummeted 98% to finish at 20.5 WPM yesterday. How the mighty are falling!
Malwords: A Quick Refresher
Malwords are keywords weaponized for information warfare. They function within public discourse as intellectual malware, verbal viruses designed to spread quickly for the purposes of a) silencing dissent through control of language, narrative, and speech, b) increasing public tolerance for government-sanctioned atrocity and c) emboldening officials to commit acts of atrocity.
Malword strength is measured by their frequency of appearance in the published body of language (corpus), and expressed in words per million (WPM) linguistic units (words, numbers, symbols, acronyms, etc). The average person processes 20,000-30,000 linguistic units over the course of a day, so if a particular malword shows up in the news corpus at a frequency of over 50 WPM, chances of hearing that term at least once in daily consumption of news is high.
CyberGeddon: Fear By The Numbers
NUCLEAR (129.87 WPM, Avg 42.2 WPM, 30D +243%) and CYBERATTACK (6.1 WPM, Avg 2.91 WPM, 30D +274%) are in two totally different weight classes.
Much of that difference has to do with NUCLEAR also having energy, medical, and famlial colocations. Colocates (or “colos”) refers to frequency of terms +/- 4 LU’s of the referent malword, which is a great way to understand context and attitude.
Top NUCLEAR military colos by percent growth in the news corpus are: FORCES, DETERRENT, WAR, THREATS, MISSILES, OPTION, STATES, SITE, CONTROL, SANCTIONS.
Top CYBERATTACK colos by percent growth in the news corpus are: UKRAINIAN, DELIBERATE, LARGE-SCALE, SUSPECTED, RUSSIAN, DESTRUCTIVE, MASSIVE, WORST, HUGE, MALICIOUS.
Colos around CYBERATTACK are more emotionally freighted, and growing 50% faster, with 30-Day increase of 212%, vs 141% among NUCLEAR colos.
Understandably so. Regardless of politics, people sense more a immediate threat from nuclear plants melting downs than from nuclear missiles falling out of the sky.
Ballistic nukes are over there; cyber-nukes are already here, embedded in our critical infrastructure waiting to be detonated with little to no warning, taking out our electric, water, gas, transportation, distribution, healthcare, and communications infrastructure in mass domino event that can potentially leave as many dead and dying as a mushroom cloud.
Caught In Crossfire of Real-Time, Real-War Games
The global(ist) laptop class is flocking to Ukraine’s “IT Army.” a volunteer cadre of of over 400,000 hackers according to the Wall Street Journal, engaged in cat-and-mouse with arguably the world’s best funded, experienced, deadliest cyber superpower.
Disaster waiting to happen…like NOW! One bullet from a cellar on the American continent taking out a piece of Russian infrastructure can have deadly consequences for Deplorables.
Plenty of ammo to go around. We are seeing increased activity from familiar ransomware vehicles such as DarkSide, Emotet and, SunBurst— tools of cybercrime and state-sponsored groups located both in Russia and Ukraine.
New kids on the block include variants of WhisperGate and HermeticWiper destroyware, and Cyclops Blink, which targets home and small office routers for botnet armies.
Putin Not Our Friend, But Not Stark Raving Mad
Despite best efforts by Deep State mouthpieces to cognitively handicap Vlad in at least an analagous manner to Joe Biden—maybe Joe is senile, but Vlad is insane!— the story is just not sticking.
PUTIN closed at 472.43 WPM (+95% 5D, 1153% 30D). His colos are up, but are mostly neutral: FULL-SCALE, INVASION, FORCES, WAR, ANNOUNCEMENT, NUCLEAR, INDEPENDENT, MOVE, ORDER, TROOPS, AGGRESSION, DECISION, UKRAINIAN.
Not even a smidgen of psychosis. For now, as long as his aggression stays within Ukrainian borders, he seems to be in possession of his faculties.
Truckers Gaining Friends, Losing Ground
TRUCKER (12.4 WPM, -72% 5D, +373% 30D), and CONVOY (50.15WPM, -12% 5D +1998% 30D) are showing pullbacks we saw with the Freedom Convoy the week before Trudeau called in the stormtroopers. This could be media pulling the curtain to cover a coming crackdown.
Convoy leadership should re-evaluate strategy. Right now, our Ukraine-Insane ruling class is in no mood to dialogue with peasants over abstract concepts like freedom and accountability, especially when there is a war they might miss out on.
What is most needed now is not a parade, but strikes and mass civil disobedience and non-compliance to bring government and its weaponized media under control of the people before the opposite happens.
Harvey Oxenhorn is a cybersecurity consultant, and author of the upcoming book, The Atrocity Algorithm: How the Media Became the Enemy of the People. Follow him on Gettr, Gab, and MeWe @HarveyOxenhorn