Quantifying the Engagement Effectiveness of Cyber Cognitive Attacks: A Behavioral Metric for Disinformation Campaigns
Bonnie Rushing, Shouhuai Xu
TL;DR
The paper addresses the lack of standardized metrics for quantifying engagement in cyber cognitive attacks and disinformation campaigns. It proposes a weighted engagement metric, $E = I/t$, where $I = \sum_j w_j i_j$ and interaction weights are $w_{view}=0.1$, $w_{like}=0.3$, $w_{comment}=0.7$, $w_{share}=1.0$, enabling cross-platform assessment. It validates the approach with real-world Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook case studies, deriving an ordinal grading scale from F to A+ to reflect engagement depth. The work discusses limitations, outlines future research directions, and positions the metric for integration with the DISARM framework to support real-time detection and defense against disinformation campaigns.
Abstract
As disinformation-driven cognitive attacks become increasingly sophisticated, the ability to quantify their impact is essential for advancing cybersecurity defense strategies. This paper presents a novel framework for measuring the engagement effectiveness of cognitive attacks by introducing a weighted interaction metric that accounts for both the type and volume of user engagement relative to the number of attacker-generated transmissions. Applying this model to real-world disinformation campaigns across social media platforms, we demonstrate how the metric captures not just reach but the behavioral depth of user engagement. Our findings provide new insights into the behavioral dynamics of cognitive warfare and offer actionable tools for researchers and practitioners seeking to assess and counter the spread of malicious influence online.