From online videos with high production values to articles circulated around the internet – including the widely-read 'Message to my sisters' in their propaganda magazine Dabiq – this group has been savvy in its use of cyber propaganda.
"There is a new appreciation that Russia has acquired a very sophisticated capacity for what is being labelled asymmetric, unattributed aggression, which is a combination of political pressure, economic pressure, cyber, propaganda, special forces, surrogates, infiltrators, equipment provision".
It's an age in which even the limited rules in place can be broken with impunity by the powerful – even as journalists and activists who cross them are targeted for destruction by state-corporate alliances armed with increasingly sophisticated cyber weapons, propaganda techniques and surveillance authority.
"They do this through means as varied as cyber-attacks, propaganda or subversion of democratic process.
In remarks that were plainly directed at Russia, Younger said the UK and other European democracies faced a "fundamental threat" from hostile states employing cyber-attacks, propaganda and "subversion of the democratic process".
The head of the British intelligence agency MI6, Alex Younger, has said cyber-attacks, propaganda and subversion from hostile states pose a "fundamental threat" to European democracies, including the UK.
In his war against the west he has deployed heavy military equipment, energy-supply blackmail, cyber-attack, propaganda by sophisticated, well-funded broadcasters, covert operations and agents of influence in EU capitals – oh yes, and Russian bombers nosing up the English Channel with their transponders off, potentially endangering civilian flights.
Nato's plans would need to include not just conventional forces, he added, but countering "political agitation and subversion, cyber-attack, hostile propaganda and other destabilising effects".
The west's economic sanctions are a prime example of "weaponising finance", while instruments from cyber-attacks to propaganda campaigns also represent alternatives to tanks and guns.
But the Baltic nations say they are already under attack from Russia by non-conventional means, such as cyber warfare and Russian propaganda, mainly on TV channels watched by the sizeable Russian-speaking minority in Latvia and Estonia.
In addition to physical violence, the Vietnamese government has increasingly used online trolls to post negative propaganda about cyber activists on facebook and report activists' accounts in order to shut them down. .
