The growing challenge that disinformation campaigns represent for national security and social stability has prompted public administrations to establish coordinated response mechanisms in Spain. In this context, the Forum against disinformation campaigns in the field of National Security, constituted by Agreement of the Council of Ministers of Spain, emerges as a key space for public-private collaboration in understanding and mitigating this threat. The Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection Research Group (GiCP) has actively participated in the initiatives developed by the Forum during 2024, contributing its academic and methodological expertise to this collective effort.
The Forum Against Disinformation Campaigns: A Collaborative Framework.
This collegial body, chaired by the Spain’s Department of National Security and with a secretariat exercised by the same department, has been configured as a fundamental scenario for analyzing the complexity of disinformation campaigns. Its main objective is to identify the mechanisms that allow their propagation and to develop effective strategies to limit their negative impact on society.
GiCP Involvement: Contributions to the 2024 Initiatives.
Last April 10, 2025, at the Diplomatic School of Spain, the Forum against disinformation campaigns in the field of national security presented the results of the work developed during the last year: “Initiatives 2024”. The event brought together representatives of the Public Administration, academia, the private sector and civil society, in a day that reflected the commitment of Spanish society to the fight against disinformation campaigns.
During the year 2024, the Forum against Disinformation Campaigns has promoted six strategic initiatives with the participation of the GiCP in two of them.
These initiatives focus on aspects that are crucial to understanding and combating this phenomenon:
- 125 terms of disinformation.
- The role of the media and Dircoms in the fight against disinformation.
- Monetization and economics of disinformation.
- Disinformation engineering.
- Disinformation campaigns and promotion of hate speech.
- Media and public skepticism about the existence of disinformation campaigns.
Specifically, the research group has participated in the chapters on Disinformation Engineering and Monetization and Economics of Disinformation. The content of these chapters is aligned with objectives of the SafeHorizon and the CIRMA projects in which we also work, through the development of open source tools for LEAs, CERTs and CSIRTS in the fight against cybercrime operations through intelligence gathering. The increasing sophistication and interconnectedness of this criminal ecosystem was recently highlighted by a report detailing online marketplaces published by El País, where malicious software developers, tool vendors, and data thieves offer their services, demonstrating the need for robust intelligence gathering capabilities.
GiCP’s participation in the Forum against disinformation campaigns in the field of National Security has allowed to deepen the understanding of the complex dynamics underlying disinformation campaigns, laying the foundations for the development of more effective strategies for their mitigation. The GiCP reaffirms its commitment to research and inter-agency collaboration in the fight against this global challenge.
