In this paper, Christopher Whyte looks at how cyber operations have changed the way information warfare works, especially in democracies. He argues that there are not random hacks, but rather all carefully planned tactics meant to influence the public opinion and weaken trust in democratic institutions. He examines the US 2016 election as a main example, showing how leaked emails and social media manipulation were used together to divide people and shape political narratives. Cyber operations give foreign actors a way to access and weaponize real information, making their influence more believable and harder to detect. What we often think of as ‘cyber conflict’ is actually more about undermining democracy from within than attacking from the outside.
