DR. GREGORY CARPENTER
Cognitive Warfare's Epidemiologist
Critical Cognitive Infrastructure
Principal Partner, CW PENSEC, specializing in cyber operations and medical device security
27-year US Army veteran, spanning cyber, medical service, and counterintelligence roles
Doctorate in Public Health (DrPH); former Counterintelligence Division Chief, Army Research Labs
Co-author of "Reverse Deception: Organized Cyber Threat Counter-Exploitation"
Fellow, Royal Society of the Arts
Thursday
2:40 PM
Pathogenic Vectors: An Emerging Threat to Neurosecurity
Pathogenic neurosecurity vectors represent an emerging cognitive security problem in which biological, ecological, clinical, or engineered pathways compromise nervous-system function and degrade the reliability of cognition, behavior, autonomy, and decision-making. We introduce a general pathogenic neurosecurity framework, then use Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus as a high-fidelity biological case study to illuminate the anatomical, physiological, operational, and surveillance dimensions of the model.
EEEV is a rare but severe mosquito-borne alphavirus maintained in an enzootic cycle involving Culiseta melanura mosquitoes and passerine birds as amplifying hosts, with spillover to humans and horses through bridge vectors. Humans and horses are dead-end hosts, but severe human disease can produce neuroinvasive consequences including encephalitis, seizures, altered mental status, coma, death, and long-term neurological impairment. Within a cognitive security frame, the relevance of EEEV is not case volume; it is the way a small ecological vector can compromise the biological substrate of cognition and expose weaknesses in detection, attribution, clinical response, risk communication, and cross-sector coordination.
We then examine cognitive and behavioral reliability as protected functions. We evaluate how neuroinvasive disease can degrade orientation, attention, judgment, executive control, behavioral stability, functional autonomy, and evidentiary reliability. We then present mitigation strategies across five domains: ecological surveillance, clinical recognition, neurocognitive assessment, continuity-of-function planning, and integrated One Health response. The central argument is that cognitive security cannot be limited to information systems, influence operations, or neurotechnology. The nervous system itself must be treated as a protected surface, and pathogenic neurosecurity vectors require an architecture that detects upstream ecological signals before neurological casualties accumulate.
Dr. Gregory Carpenter is a cybersecurity and biomedical systems strategist who spent 27 years in the US Army across infantry, logistics, medical service, and military intelligence roles, experience that now shapes his focus on how threats propagate across technical, biological, and cognitive systems. He holds a Doctorate in Public Health and currently serves as Principal Partner at CW PENSEC, leading initiatives spanning cyber operations, medical device security, and global health systems. Carpenter is a co-author of "Reverse Deception: Organized Cyber Threat Counter-Exploitation" (McGraw-Hill, 2012), a widely cited guide to counterintelligence tactics against advanced persistent threats. His background spanning military intelligence and public health gives him a rare vantage point: he treats cognitive and information threats the way an epidemiologist treats disease, tracking how they spread rather than just how they intrude.