Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am here with my brother as always, coming to you from a very rainy Jerusalem on this twenty-second of February, twenty-twenty-six.
Herman Poppleberry here. It is good to be back in the studio, Corn. And you are right, the weather outside is a bit gloomy, but the topic today is incredibly sharp. It hits very close to home for us here in Israel, especially given the events of the last few years.
It really does. We are diving into a prompt from Daniel today that touches on the invisible architecture of modern conflict. He wants us to break down the world of operational security and information security, or OPSEC and INFOSEC.
This is a fantastic prompt because these terms are thrown around constantly in news reports and tech blogs, often as if they mean the same thing. But in a military or high-stakes intelligence context, they are distinct disciplines with very different philosophies. As Daniel pointed out, the stakes for getting them wrong have never been higher. We are living in an era where the line between the front lines and civilian life has been completely erased by the smartphone in your pocket.
Exactly. We have seen some wild and frankly terrifying stories lately about how these vulnerabilities are being exploited right here in our backyard. So, Herman, let us start with the foundation. You have been digging into the doctrine. How do we actually separate INFOSEC from OPSEC?
The easiest way to visualize it is that information security, or INFOSEC, is about the data itself. It is the technical, administrative, and physical side of protecting information from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, or destruction. If you think of your life as a castle, INFOSEC represents the height of the walls, the strength of the gate, and the guards checking IDs at the entrance. It is built around what we call the CIA triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
I have heard that term before. Can you break down the CIA triad for us?
Of course. Confidentiality means ensuring that only authorized individuals have access to the information. Integrity means the data has not been tampered with or altered by an unauthorized party. And availability means that the systems and the data are actually there when the authorized users need them. If a hacker encrypts your files with ransomware, they have attacked the availability. If they leak your emails, they have attacked the confidentiality. If they change the numbers on a bank transfer, they have attacked the integrity. It is very technical. It involves encryption, firewalls, multi-factor authentication, and secure servers.
Okay, so INFOSEC is the shield around the information. It is the "what" and the "how" of protection.
Exactly. Now, operational security, or OPSEC, is much more abstract and, in many ways, much harder to master. It is not just about the data; it is about the actions, the patterns, and the process. OPSEC is the process of identifying critical information and then analyzing friendly actions to see if they can be observed by adversary intelligence systems. The goal of OPSEC is to deny an opponent the specific pieces of information they need to figure out your intentions, your capabilities, or your timeline.
So if INFOSEC is the lock on the safe, OPSEC is making sure no one sees you walking toward the safe or notices that you are carrying a big heavy bag into the building at three in the morning.
That is a perfect way to put it. In fact, the formal doctrine of OPSEC actually has a five-step process that military planners use. Step one is identifying your critical information. What does the enemy want to know? Step two is analyzing the threat. Who is looking for it? Step three is analyzing your vulnerabilities. How are we leaking this? Step four is assessing the risk. If they find out, how bad is it? And step five is applying the countermeasures.
You mentioned earlier that the term OPSEC comes from the Vietnam War. I would love to hear that story because it really illustrates the difference.
It is a classic piece of military history. In nineteen-sixty-six, the United States was running a massive bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder. The problem was that the North Vietnamese seemed to know exactly when and where the bombers were coming. They were moving their anti-aircraft batteries and clearing out targets before the planes even took off. The U.S. was baffled. They had great INFOSEC. Their flight plans were classified and encrypted. Their communications were secure. They checked for spies. Nothing.
So how were they getting the info?
A team called Operation Purple Dragon was formed to investigate. They realized the North Vietnamese weren't hacking the radios; they were watching the "indicators." They noticed that every time a big mission was planned, there was a surge in laundry services at the air bases in Guam and Thailand. The pilots wanted clean flight suits. They noticed a spike in pizza deliveries to the command centers late at night. They even watched the local markets to see when the military was buying extra supplies. By piecing together these non-secret, observable actions, the North Vietnamese could predict a strike with incredible accuracy. That was the birth of OPSEC as a formal discipline. It is the "meta-data" of human behavior.
That is fascinating. It is about the shadows cast by the information, not the information itself. And that brings us directly to the current situation here in Israel that Daniel mentioned. We have seen these reports about militant groups, specifically Hamas and Hezbollah, using fake social media profiles to target soldiers. That feels like a massive OPSEC failure that leads to an INFOSEC breach.
It is the ultimate modern "honeytrap." This is a classic social engineering attack. What happens is an intelligence operative—often sitting in a room in Gaza or even abroad—creates a profile of an attractive woman on Instagram, Telegram, or dating apps like Tinder and Bumble. They use AI-generated photos or stolen images from real influencers to make the profile look legitimate. Then, they start reaching out to soldiers or reservists.
And because so many people are on high alert or feeling lonely during a deployment, they might be more susceptible to a friendly message.
Exactly. They strike up a conversation, build some rapport, and use what we call "elicitation techniques." They will say things like, "Oh, you look so brave in your uniform. Are you stationed somewhere dangerous? Is it cold in the north right now?" That is a direct attempt to get the soldier to commit an OPSEC violation by revealing their location or unit. But it goes deeper. Once they have built trust, they will say, "This app is glitchy, let us move to a more private chat app," and they send a link to a custom-made application.
I remember seeing the names of some of these apps in the news. They had names like "GlanceLove" or "Golden Cup."
Right. And the soldier thinks they are just downloading a niche dating app or a World Cup scores app. But the moment they install it, the trap snaps shut. This is where it transitions from an OPSEC failure—talking to a stranger—to a catastrophic INFOSEC breach. These apps are actually sophisticated malware. Once installed, the adversary has full remote access to the phone. They can turn on the microphone to listen to briefings, they can use the camera to see inside a command center, they can scrape the entire contact list, and most importantly, they can track the GPS location in real time.
So you have a bugged device sitting right in the middle of a staging area or a tactical operations center.
Precisely. And in the Israeli context, this is amplified by what Daniel called the "people's army." In Israel, the military isn't some distant, professional caste. It is everyone. You have high-tech engineers, lawyers, and students who are civilians on Friday and wearing a uniform on Saturday. They are carrying the same smartphone they use for their business, their family group chats, and their social media presence. That transition is a security nightmare.
It seems like the digital habits of a civilian are fundamentally at odds with the requirements of a soldier. If I am used to posting my lunch, my workouts, and my location every day, I am not going to magically stop just because I am in uniform.
That is the "digital exhaust" problem. A career soldier might be trained in "digital silence," but a reservist is a civilian who happens to be a soldier. Their digital footprint is already massive. An adversary doesn't need to hack a secure IDF server to find out where a specific unit is moving. They just need to find the one guy in the unit who forgot to turn off his location services on a fitness app like Strava or Garmin.
You mentioned Strava, and we have to talk about "Strava-gate" from a few years ago. That was a huge wake-up call for the global military community.
It was a perfect example of an OPSEC fail through a third-party app. In twenty-eighteen, Strava released a "heat map" showing the activity of all its users worldwide. It looked like a beautiful glowing map of the world. But security researchers quickly realized that in places like Syria, Afghanistan, and Djibouti, the only people using Strava were Western soldiers. You could see the exact perimeters of secret "black sites" and forward operating bases because the soldiers were running laps around the fence line every morning. You could even see the supply routes because they would go for bike rides between bases.
And again, that wasn't a hack. The data was shared voluntarily.
Exactly. It was a failure to understand how individual data points, when aggregated, reveal a secret pattern. That is the essence of OPSEC. Now, fast forward to today, and we have the "TikTok War" phenomenon. We see soldiers in Gaza or on the northern border filming themselves. Sometimes it is just a dance, sometimes it is a video of them eating dinner in a captured house. Daniel asked about the mission risks here. Herman, what are the tactical implications of a ten-second TikTok video?
They are immediate and potentially lethal. First, there is geolocation. Even if the soldier doesn't say where they are, the background of the video provides everything an intelligence officer needs. They use a technique called "OSINT" or Open Source Intelligence. They look at the skyline, the specific architecture of a minaret, the shape of a water tower, or even the type of vegetation. There are people on the internet who can find a specific street corner in Gaza within minutes of a video being posted just by looking at the cracks in the pavement and cross-referencing them with satellite imagery.
And once they have the location, they have a target.
Exactly. If a soldier posts a video in real time, that building can be targeted by a mortar, an anti-tank missile, or a suicide drone before the video even finishes uploading. But it is also about the "order of battle." If I see a specific unit insignia on a shoulder patch, or a specific modification on a tank in the background, I now know which brigade is operating in that sector. I can estimate their strength, their equipment, and their morale. You are giving the enemy a free, high-definition look at your front lines.
Then there is the "doxing" risk Daniel mentioned. This feels like a newer, more personal threat for soldiers in twenty-twenty-six.
It is a form of "lawfare" and personal harassment. Groups like the Hind Rajab Foundation and various activist collectives are actively scraping social media for any footage posted by Israeli soldiers. They use facial recognition software—which has become incredibly cheap and accurate—to identify the soldiers. Once they have a face, they find the LinkedIn profile, the Facebook page, and the home address.
And then what?
Then they build a dossier. They might send that information to international legal bodies, claiming the soldier was involved in a specific incident. Or, more commonly, they target the soldier's civilian life. They contact their employer and demand they be fired. They harass their family members. They post their phone numbers on Telegram channels that advocate for violence. It creates a situation where the war follows the soldier home. The "front line" is now their front door. It is a psychological weight that previous generations of soldiers never had to carry.
It feels like the military hierarchy is struggling to keep up. Why hasn't there been a total ban on smartphones in the field? Surely that would solve the problem.
They have tried. In high-security units or during specific operations, phones are confiscated and put in "Faraday bags" that block all signals. But a total, military-wide ban is almost impossible to enforce in twenty-twenty-six. First, there is the morale aspect. In a long, grinding conflict, being able to video call your kids or your spouse is the only thing keeping some soldiers sane. If you take that away for months, you risk a total collapse in morale.
And phones are actually useful tools on the battlefield now, right?
They are indispensable. Soldiers use them for offline maps, for translating captured documents, for calculating mortar trajectories with specialized apps, and for quick communication when the official radio networks are jammed or down. The smartphone is a multi-tool. The problem is that it is a "leaky" tool. It is constantly trying to talk to cell towers, Wi-Fi networks, and satellites. Even if you aren't posting to TikTok, your phone might be "pining" a local cell tower that is controlled by the enemy.
So the challenge isn't total abstinence; it is "digital discipline." But how do you teach that to a twenty-year-old who has lived their entire life on camera?
It is a massive training hurdle. The IDF's C4I Directorate—which handles telecommunications and cyber defense—now runs mandatory workshops. They will actually show soldiers their own digital footprints. They will say, "Here is a photo you took three years ago at a party, and here is how we used it to find your current position." They even run their own "honeytrap" exercises. They will create a fake profile, lure a soldier into a conversation, and then when the soldier agrees to meet or download an app, they get a message saying, "You just been caught by your own security team. Here is why you are a liability."
That is a tough lesson to learn. But I want to pivot to the last part of Daniel's prompt, which I think is really relevant for our listeners who aren't in the military. How have these doctrines—INFOSEC and OPSEC—moved into the corporate world and our daily lives?
This is where the "weird prompts" get practical. Almost every major trend in modern cybersecurity is just military INFOSEC and OPSEC rebranded for the private sector. Take the concept of "Zero Trust Architecture," or ZTA. In the old days of corporate security, you had a "perimeter." Once you were inside the office and logged into the network, you were trusted.
Like the castle walls you mentioned earlier.
Exactly. But in a world of remote work and cloud computing, there is no perimeter. Zero Trust says, "I don't care if you are the CEO sitting in the main office; I am going to verify your identity, your device, and your location every single time you try to access a file." It is the military principle of "Need to Know" applied to every single digital interaction. You are never trusted by default.
And what about OPSEC in the corporate world?
We see it in "threat hunting" and "Digital Risk Protection." Companies now hire firms to do exactly what Operation Purple Dragon did. They monitor the dark web to see if hackers are talking about their employees. They look for "typo-squatting" domains—like "myweirdprompts-dot-co" instead of "dot-com"—that might be used for phishing. They even monitor the social media of their executives to make sure they aren't accidentally revealing sensitive information.
I imagine a CEO posting a selfie in a private jet could be a huge OPSEC fail if the tail number of the plane is visible, or if the reflection in their sunglasses shows a sensitive document.
Exactly! There are actually "corporate OPSEC" consultants who specialize in scrubbing the digital footprints of high-net-worth individuals. They look for things like "property tax records" or "voter registration data" that could be used by a kidnapper or a corporate spy. It is the same process: identify critical info, analyze the threat, and apply countermeasures.
It also shows up in how we handle "Business Email Compromise" or BEC. That is basically the corporate version of the honeytrap, right?
It is exactly the same psychological exploit. Instead of an attractive woman on Tinder, it is an email that looks like it is from the CFO, sent on a Friday afternoon, saying, "I am in a meeting and I need you to wire fifty thousand dollars to this new vendor immediately or the deal falls through." It creates a sense of urgency and authority to bypass the technical INFOSEC layers. The countermeasure isn't a better firewall; it is a human-level OPSEC rule: "Always verify a wire transfer request with a phone call on a known number."
It is interesting how it all comes back to human psychology. You can have the best encryption in the world, but if you can convince the person with the key to just hand it over, the encryption doesn't matter.
That is the "Layer Seven" problem—the human layer. And as we move deeper into twenty-twenty-six, AI is making this even more complex. We are seeing "Deepfake" audio and video being used in these attacks. Imagine a soldier getting a video call from their commander, and it looks and sounds exactly like them, telling them to move to a new location. Or a CEO getting a call from their board chairman.
That is terrifying. So, how do we defend against that? Is there such a thing as "AI-driven OPSEC"?
There is. We are starting to see the rise of "personal security guardians." These are AI agents that sit on your devices—with your permission—and act as a sort of digital conscience. If you are about to post a photo, the AI scans the background for sensitive items, blurs out faces of people who haven't given consent, and checks the metadata for GPS coordinates. It might even warn you, "Hey, you have been talking to this new contact for three days and they have asked four questions about your workplace. This matches a known social engineering pattern."
It is like having a little Herman Poppleberry sitting on your shoulder, whispering, "Don't click that link, Corn!"
Exactly! But it brings up a massive privacy tension. Do you want an AI—especially one potentially controlled by your employer or the government—scanning every photo and message you send? In a democratic society like Israel, that is a very hard sell. We are seeing a constant negotiation between the need for security and the right to a private life.
It really feels like the "front line" has become a lifestyle. If you are a reservist, or even just a person with access to sensitive data, you are never truly "off duty." The internet has a perfect and permanent memory. If you leak your location today, it could be used against you five years from now.
That is the most profound change. In the twentieth century, OPSEC was something you did during a mission. In the twenty-first century, OPSEC is how you live your life. It is about understanding your "digital exhaust." Every time you interact with a smart device, you are leaving a trail. If you don't manage that trail, someone else—whether it is a militant group, a corporate spy, or a common criminal—will use it to find you.
So, for our listeners who are just trying to navigate this world, what are the three big takeaways?
Number one: Understand the difference. INFOSEC is your password and your firewall; OPSEC is your behavior and your patterns. You need both. Number two: Audit your digital exhaust. Check your privacy settings on every app, especially fitness trackers and social media. Turn off location services unless you absolutely need them. And number three: Practice "healthy paranoia." If a stranger reaches out to you online and the conversation feels too good to be true, or if they start asking "innocent" questions about your job or your location, back away. Verify, then maybe trust a little bit.
"Verify, then maybe trust a little bit." I like that. It is a bit more cynical than "Trust but verify," but it fits the world of twenty-twenty-six.
It is the only way to stay safe. The Israel example is a stark warning for the rest of the world. When a "people's army" meets the "social media age," the friction is intense. We are the test case for how a modern society maintains security when every citizen is a potential leak.
Well, I think we have thoroughly covered Daniel's prompt. It is a lot to process, and it definitely makes me want to go home and check my own settings again.
Me too, Corn. Me too.
Before we wrap up, I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been listening and sending in these prompts. If you found this deep dive into OPSEC and INFOSEC helpful, please take a moment to leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show grow and allows us to keep doing these deep dives.
And remember, you can find all our past episodes, our category taxonomy, and a contact form at myweirdprompts-dot-com. If you have a prompt that is bothering you, send it our way at show at myweirdprompts-dot-com.
We are also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your digital fix. Thanks again to Daniel for this timely and important prompt.
Stay safe out there, everyone. Keep your gates locked and your patterns hidden.
Goodbye everyone. See you next time on My Weird Prompts.
Goodbye.
