# Epistemological Attack
**Domain:** Cognitive Security / Epistemology / Cybersecurity
**Doc Type:** Corpus Concept Node
**Maturity:** Developing
## Definition
An **epistemological attack** degrades a target's capacity to determine what is authentic, trustworthy, safe or causally connected.
## Cyber Context
Compromise of devices, backups, administrator accounts, authentication channels and support relationships can make every attempted recovery depend on a foundation the target cannot verify.
## Evidence Boundary
Uncertainty may result from attack, system complexity, ordinary failure or incomplete evidence. The concept describes the damaged capacity to know; it does not by itself identify an attacker.
## See Also
[[wiki/Concealed Causation|Concealed Causation]], [[wiki/Cyber Attribution|Cyber Attribution]], [[wiki/Recovery Topology|Recovery Topology]]