Category Archives: ben nimmo

Facebook takes down Russian-linked disinformation targeting Ukraine

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In its latest effort to root out disinformation on its platform, Facebook announced it is taking down 97 pages, groups, and accounts emanating from Russia and targeting Ukraine that attempted to conceal who was behind them. Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher clarified that Facebook was taking them down because of their manipulative behavior and not due to the content they were posting. The groups, accounts, and pages posted primarily about political topics of local concern in Ukraine, such as the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, the conflict in Syria, Russian politics, and European politics, Gleicher said in a blog post. The actors used fake accounts to disseminate information and also worked to redirect users to an external site that posted on similar topics. In one case up to 34,000 users followed a page coordinating disinformation, and in another, up to 86,000 accounts joined one of the groups. Ben Nimmo, who […]

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Why Twitter’s bot problem is a looming security challenge

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The persons or groups behind Twitter’s thousands of bot accounts have realized they can attack people without triggering Twitter’s protective security policies, presenting a rapidly evolving information security challenge for the social media network. Late last month, bot researchers at ProPublica and the Atlantic Council were attacked by a campaign of Twitter bots, which spammed the victim accounts with thousands of retweets and likes, causing Twitter to temporarily suspend certain accounts for unusually high activity. Ben Nimmo, Information Defense Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, was personally targeted by the bot campaign and live-tweeted his analysis of the attacks, which included impersonations of Atlantic Council user accounts that tweeted fake content, like a message alleging that Nimmo had died. “They certainly wanted to intimidate me by faking those accounts. That was about scaring me, rather than me getting blocked,” Nimmo told Cyberscoop. Nimmo noted that he was easily […]

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