Category Archives: information operations

US seizes more domains with ties to suspected Iranian influence campaign

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The U.S. Department of Justice’s actions against alleged Iranian influence campaigns continued this week with the seizure of 27 internet domains, including four that the feds say were targeted directly at U.S. audiences. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) unlawfully used the domains in operations to “covertly influence” opinions in the U.S. and elsewhere, the department said in an announcement Wednesday. In early October, the feds seized 92 domains under similar allegations. Later that month, the Treasury Department sanctioned five Iran-linked organizations for spreading disinformation and making other attempts to sow discord in the U.S. As with previous announcements, U.S. officials cited help from Silicon Valley giants. “Thanks to our ongoing collaboration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the FBI was able to disrupt this Iranian propaganda campaign and we will continue to pursue any attempts by foreign actors to spread disinformation in our country,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Craig […]

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After a quiet election night on the cyber front, officials preach vigilance as results come in

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After years of preparation from security professionals and election officials, Election Day went down without any significant publicly reported cybersecurity incidents, U.S. officials told reporters Tuesday. Federal and state officials were on watch for any unusual digital activity, but all in an all, it was just “another Tuesday on the internet,” as a senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official put it. In other words, there were no reports of targeted cyberattacks from U.S. adversaries. Security experts chalked the smooth operation up to vigilance on the part of officials across the election ecosystem, and the resiliency built into the voting process. Voting machines and electronic pollbooks suffered glitches in certain counties in Georgia and Ohio, but they were technical errors that are to be expected and not caused by anything malicious. Election administrators quickly reverted to paper backups and the voting process carried on. Officials at the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and […]

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How Twitter, Facebook say they will treat premature claims of electoral victory

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With less than 24 hours before Election Day in the United States, social media platforms were still announcing plans about how they intend to flag premature and unfounded claims of victory in the event that a candidate tries to seize on a moment of global anxiety for their own gain. While Twitter previously said it would flag misleading claims about election results, the company on Monday clarified the criteria on which it will base its decisions. President Trump has told several close associates that he plans to declare victory on election night if he looks like he’s “ahead,” regardless of the official tally, according to Axios. Twitter, meanwhile, has made it clear that it will consider such claims premature if they come before at least two outlets from a pool including ABC News, the Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News, and NBC News publicly share their projections or election results. Twitter has also said […]

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Don’t let election-themed misinformation fool you. Here’s what to watch out for.

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Whether it’s Russian trolls or verified Twitter accounts spreading disinformation during the current political moment almost is besides the point. Four years after Russian operatives aimed to influence the 2016 election in favor of President Donald Trump by spreading lies on social media, a large range of groups, lawmakers and influential political voices have been amplifying false claims in to boost their own political goals ahead of the 2020 elections. U.S. voters are bombarded with misinformation prior to Election Day in the form of social media posts, text messages, robocalls and tweets from President Trump and his campaign staffers. There’s also been threatening emails traced to Iran, and recent reports of how a Russian agent sought to sway political opinion in the U.S. While many could feel a sense of whiplash from the onslaught of manufactured narratives, academics and social scientists are advising Americans to be careful, and fact-check claims about the election, voting processes, and any political candidate, particularly if the allegations […]

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Iran’s bogus email campaign on U.S. elections had a Facebook disinformation prong

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Facebook has removed a network of fake accounts and pages with connections to the Iranian government, one of which was peddling misinformation related to the U.S. elections, the company announced Tuesday. The Iranian network broadly focused on the U.S. and Israel, but it included one fake account that was operating as part of the Iranian email misinformation campaign that sent unsubstantiated threats about voting to Democratic voters in the U.S., Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher told reporters in a phone call. The email campaign, which the U.S. government called out last week, threatened targets to vote for President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential elections. After a tipoff from the FBI, which announced Iran was behind the email misinformation campaign last week, Facebook removed the related account on its platform and discovered it was connected with 11 other fake Facebook accounts, six fake Facebook pages, and 11 fake Instagram accounts. These accounts […]

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Twitter introduces banner debunking voter misinformation

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Twitter launched a feature on its platform Monday that seeks to debunk misinformation about voting in a last minute effort to inform users of weaponized information operations. The feature, which appears as a a banner that greets Twitter users at the top of their feeds, already had a message for American voters Monday: People are spreading misinformation about election fraud and voting by mail. “You might encounter misleading information about voting by mail,” the banner reads. “Election experts confirm that voting by mail is safe and secure, even with an increase in mail-in ballots. Even so you might encounter unconfirmed claims that voting by mail leads to election fraud ahead of the 2020 US elections.” President Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that voting by mail is linked with fraud, when in reality mail-in ballot fraud-related cases are extremely rare. The announcement of the Twitter feature is just the latest effort from social […]

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The worst part about finding Facebook disinformation is finding it again

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When Facebook said in August it had removed a network of fake accounts that had been trying to amplify criticism of President Donald Trump, it gave some external researchers a sense of déjà vu. After all, Facebook had taken intermittent action against accounts, pages and groups that were misrepresenting themselves to promote China’s Communist Party, including specific removals of a campaign known as Spamouflage Dragon. The Spamouflage campaign apparently began in the summer of 2019 as a scheme to denounce pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, eventually shifting to demonize critics of Beijing and to praise China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. By August 2020, Facebook, like Twitter and YouTube, was still removing Spamouflage-affiliated accounts that bashed Trump’s inaction on the coronavirus and U.S. scrutiny of TikTok under its “coordinated inauthentic behavior” policy. Other networks of accounts also have managed to return to Facebook after they were detected and previously removed, […]

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US Treasury sanctions 5 Iranian organizations for alleged election influence operations

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The Treasury Department on Thursday announced sanctions against five Iranian organizations for allegedly trying to influence the U.S. election through disinformation campaigns and other attempts to sow discord. Those sanctioned for the activity included the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, one of its alleged front companies, the IRGC’s Quds Force and media companies allegedly linked to the Quds Force. It’s part of a broader federal effort to push back on foreign influence operations less than two weeks from Election Day. The Iranian media outlets are accused of using English-language articles that amplify “false narratives” to sow divisions among U.S. audiences. “As recently as summer 2020, Bayan Gostar was prepared to execute a series of influence operations directed at the U.S. populace ahead of the presidential election,” Treasury said in a statement, referring to one of the alleged front companies. The Iranian Mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to […]

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Why the US was so fast to blame Iran for voter intimidation emails in Florida

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By trying to quickly resolve concerns about an apparent Iranian influence operation, and bolster Americans’ confidence the country’s electoral process, U.S. officials have sparked an entirely new set of questions: Why were they able to connect Iran to the attack so quickly, and how? During a briefing announced to reporters 10 minutes before it began Wednesday, John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said the U.S. government had determined Iran was behind an email campaign meant to intimidate American voters. Neither Ratcliffe nor FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was also at the briefing, provided any technical evidence to support the allegation that the emails, purported to be sent by the Proud Boys as threats to Democratic voters in Florida to vote for President Donald Trump, in fact were sent by Iranian attackers. The disclosure came quickly after Motherboard on Tuesday reported on a surge of suspicious emails that seemed to use technical means to try to hide their […]

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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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