Category Archives: Atlantic Council

Spyware providers are flocking to international arms fairs to sell to NATO foes

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European and Middle Eastern spyware and surveillance firms are marketing intrusion software to adversaries of the U.S., its intelligence allies and NATO, Atlantic Council research published Monday reveals. Looking at more than 200 companies that attended international arms fairs in the past two decades, researchers found that 85% of companies likely selling interception or intrusion technologies marketed these capabilities to governments outside their home country — even when no intelligence relationship existed. Five companies, including Israel-based Cellebrite and Sweden-based Micro Systemation AB, marketed those capabilities to U.S. and NATO adversaries. Neither company immediately responded to requests for comment. The findings coincide with an explosion of surveillance vendors attending international arms trade shows, including the heavily attended Milipol France and the U.K. -based Security and Policing Home Office.  The report underscores growing concerns about the threat that spyware companies pose to the United States and its allies. U.S. and European leaders have […]

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Navalny adviser urges vigilance after impersonation attempts of Kremlin foes

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A top aide to jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny is urging Western policymakers and think tanks to be more wary of suspected Kremlin-backed information operations to undermine their work. Navalny, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been detained since January, when he returned to Russia after being poisoned with a chemical nerve agent last year. In February, a Russian court sentenced him to two years in prison in a case that human rights organizations have described as a “mockery” of justice. In the meantime, digital operatives have been posing as Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff — and other perceived threats to Kremlin interests — in apparent efforts to smear critics of the Russian government. “It looks like not enough lessons have been drawn from John Podesta clicking those phishing [links] back in 2016,” he said, referring to Russian intelligence agents’ breach of the Hillary Clinton […]

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Why social media disinformation represents such a security threat

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Disinformation works on you, too. Coordinated social media campaigns aimed at influencing public opinion, both in the U.S. and abroad, represent such a threat to democratic discourse because propagandists seize on emotional conversations with little accountability. By using Facebook and Twitter to plant misinformation, attackers implicitly nudge readers into the kind of tunnel vision that accelerates a cycle of mistrust, according to two researchers who have spent years examining the issue. Graham Brookie, the director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Nina Jankowicz, author of “How to Lose the Information War,” said during a panel Tuesday that stopping disinformation requires the kind of cooperation that increasingly is difficult to find in American society. “The tricky thing about disinformation is that everybody thinks of it as somebody else’s problem, right?” Brookie said Tuesday during CyberTalks, a virtual summit hosted by CyberScoop. “We’re all looking at social […]

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Ex-DHS officials urge department to double down on its cybersecurity work

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The Department of Homeland Security has been the face of some of the Trump administration’s most fiercely criticized policies, from aggressively rounding up migrants to detaining protesters. A new bipartisan report from former DHS officials suggests the department cut ties with some of the “most partisan” aspects of its work, and redouble its efforts to protect the country from cyberthreats and infectious diseases. “For the defense of American democracy to succeed, the secretary of homeland security and DHS generally will need to be, to the greatest extent possible, ‘above politics,’” states the report, which the Atlantic Council released Thursday. The report’s authors — Caitlin Durkovich, a former assistant DHS secretary under President Barack Obama, and Thomas Warrick, who was a DHS counterterrorism official until June 2019 — propose giving some controversial elements of DHS’s portfolio, such as setting the number of immigrant visas, to the White House or another part of the federal […]

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Suspected Russian operatives tried using forged diplomatic documents, social media to create divisions

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A Russian information operation relied on forged diplomatic emails and planted articles on a number of social media sites in an attempt to undermine multiple governments and impersonate U.S. lawmakers, according to a new analysis of recent social media activity. Massachusetts-based Recorded Future on Wednesday published findings detailing how Russian-language operatives spent months using popular internet services to try to interfere in Estonia, the Republic of Georgia and the U.S. The effort appears to be a continuation of a prior Russian campaign, dubbed Operation Secondary Infektion, that utilized Facebook and dozens of online platforms to sow division in the West and discredit political efforts. The ongoing covert influence effort revealed Wednesday, known as Operation Pinball, involved activity on discussion sites like Reddit, LiveJournal, an array of self-publishing sites, falsified social media profiles that prioritized strong operational security over reaching a large audience. In one instance, Recorded Future detected a Reddit […]

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U.S. must increase defenses against Iranian information operations, report says

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As social media platforms battle Iranian bots and trolls, the U.S. government needs to step up its own fight against Tehran’s digital influence operations, a new study says. With the 2020 election approaching, Washington should do more to attribute Iranian and other foreign influence operations and warn the public about them, scholars at the Atlantic Council think tank argue. “Iran has invested significant resources and accumulated vast experience in the conduct of digital influence efforts,” the report says. It calls on the Department of Homeland Security to create an intergovernmental agency to alert U.S. officials and the public of foreign influence operations. U.S. intelligence agencies need to work closely with social media companies to pinpoint foreign influence operations, the Atlantic Council scholars Emerson Brooking and Suzanne Kianpour’s advise. That collaboration is a work in progress. While the Russian government’s use of digital influence operations received the most attention from Western […]

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The latest in Facebook’s dragnet: Propaganda from Russian military intelligence

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Facebook on Wednesday announced the removal of three networks of accounts it had determined were operating on behalf of foreign governments, including a number of pages that the company tied to Russian intelligence services. Researchers found a network of 78 accounts, 11 Pages, 29 groups and four Instagram pages that often posted about news such as Russia’s involvement in Syria and the downing of the Malaysian airliner MH17 and also had links to Russian military intelligence services, the company said. Sometimes, the account holders misrepresented themselves as citizen journalists, and contacted policymakers, reporters and other known figures in the region who could help amplify their content, Facebook said in a blog post. The other networks originated in Iran, where operators also impersonated journalists, and Vietnam and Myanmar, where the Burmese telecommunications company MyTel, which is indirectly owned by the Burmese and Vietnamese militaries, engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” These takedowns are […]

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Pro-Soleimani messaging immediately floods Twitter following general’s death in drone strike

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The U.S. drone strike that killed Iran’s top security and intelligence commander also triggered a wave of social media propaganda apparently meant to sway international opinion on an attack that represents a dramatic escalation in the conflict between Washington and Tehran. Twitter accounts claiming to be located in Iran and throughout the Middle East pushed out many thousands of tweets under a handful of hashtags, such as #HardRevenge and #DeathToAmerica, promising payback against the U.S. for President Donald Trump’s order to eliminate the Iranian commander. The #HardRevenge hashtag was included in 95,000 tweets between Jan. 1 and Jan. 3, according to Kanishk Karan, a researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. There were zero mentions in all of December 2019, Karan said. The wide availability of propaganda again highlights the difficulty that social media platforms encounter when trying to keep pace with such fraught geopolitical events. Often, social media campaigns are designed to […]

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Russia’s trolling tactics are getting more elaborate

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Facebook’s early May takedown of a Russian political disinformation operation was much larger than previously thought, according to research published this weekend by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. The Russian-linked actors behind the campaign went well beyond just amplifying political narratives on Facebook, and in fact began much earlier by planting false stories and then later amplifying these fake stories using fake accounts. In one case, these Russian-linked actors impersonated Sen. Marco Rubio’s Twitter account in a tweet that made it look like he was disparaging Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters. Then-Defense Secretary of the UK Gavin Williams was also victim to a similar photoshop effort. One of the false stories that the Russian trolls created and amplified through fake accounts includes a storyline that a Spanish intelligence agency rooted out an anti-Brexit pilot to assassinate Boris Johnson. Johnson is now in the running to serve as the UK’s next prime minister. As many Russian-linked […]

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Atlantic Council, 2019 Poland Cyber Security Conference, Day Two

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Direct from the Atlantic Council’s Poland Cyber Security Conference 2019, full Day Two streaming. Enjoy.
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