Category Archives: information operations

Here’s how Army Cyber Command plans to take on information warfare

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Amid burgeoning Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence operations aimed at manipulating U.S. politics and Americans’ understanding of the coronavirus pandemic, the Army’s top cybersecurity official has released a ten-year plan to reform his command into a more capable information warfare unit. The plan, which Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty outlined this week in Cyber Defense Review, a publication from the Army Cyber Institute, is meant to reorganize Army Cyber Command into a series of units that can work to counter adversaries’ efforts to destabilize the U.S., including by influencing adversaries’ behavior and decision-making through jamming up their signals, or by messaging and running social media information operations to control the narrative, for instance. In some cases, the reformulated Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) will focus on “skillfully communicating (or obscuring), the location, capability, and intent of Army forces,” Fogarty said. The final goal of the ten-year plan is to get ARCYBER to be able to outsmart and outmaneuver adversaries in the information space — in concert with other […]

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Islamic State propaganda efforts struggle after Telegram takedowns, report says

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The Islamic State terrorist group is reportedly struggling to regain a foothold on mainstream social networks amid tighter controls from technology firms and ongoing attention from the U.S. military. As major networks have stifled the group, it has tried to build a presence on a number of marginal social media platforms, only to be met “by increasing efforts by these companies to bring down content,” the European Union’s law enforcement agency, Europol, said Tuesday in a report examining the extremist group’s activities over 2019. Telegram, previously the primary source of terrorist propaganda online, according to Europol, said in November that it had removed more than 5,000 “terrorist accounts and bots” during a two day effort against the group, an uptick from the typical average of 200 to 300 removals. Since then, IS supporters have shifted to more fringe services, like the Russia-based TamTam and Hoop Messenger, which is hosted in Canada. Extremists also have […]

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TikTok dumps QAnon channels, following Twitter’s crackdown

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The only thing social media companies can seemingly agree upon when it comes to moderating content on their platforms is that QAnon crosses the line. TikTok has removed a number of hashtags associated with the far-right conspiracy theory group is poised to limit the spread of the group that the FBI has described as a domestic terrorism threat. The company has made it more difficult for users to search for popular hashtags, reportedly including “QAnon” and “QAnonTruth,” among others, following a similar announcement from Twitter that it would remove 7,000 accounts and limit 150,000 more. QAnon has pushed the unfounded conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump is fighting a “deep state” of government officials, celebrities and business leaders who secretly work as child sex traffickers and control global order. Its supporters frequently harass Trump critics, while believers have been linked to real-world acts of violence throughout the country. One supporter […]

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Dem lawmakers want FBI briefing on foreign interference efforts in 2020 election

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Four senior Democratic lawmakers have asked the FBI to brief all members of Congress on foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, citing an ongoing disinformation campaign. “We are gravely concerned, in particular, that Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate and the presidential election in November,” wrote Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray last week. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also signed the letter. The four lawmakers did not elaborate on the nature of the foreign interference campaign targeting Congress, but they did include a classified addendum to the letter that draws on the Trump administration’s […]

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UK ‘almost certain’ that 2019 election was target of Russian disinformation operation

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British officials expressed confidence that Russian operatives tried to interfere in the U.K.’s most recent general election by using social media to promote documents that were stolen and leaked from the government. Dominic Raab, the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, said in a statement Thursday that “it is almost certain that Russian actors” aimed to intervene in the 2019 election in which Boris Johnson defeated Jeremy Corbyn in the race for prime minister. The campaign utilized “illicitly acquired” government documents about the U.K.-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which were posted on Reddit and promoted elsewhere in an apparent attempt to influence potential voters’ opinions. “There is an ongoing criminal investigation and it would be inappropriate for us to say anything further at this point,” Raab said in a statement. “The Government reserves the right to respond with appropriate measures in the future.” The attribution is a reference to Operation Secondary Infektion, […]

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Facebook boots Roger Stone for relying on fake accounts to amplify WikiLeaks

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Facebook says it’s removing the personal account and the Instagram page belonging to Roger Stone, the longtime associate of  President Donald Trump recently convicted of seven felonies, amid ongoing scrutiny over the company’s failure to enforce its own rules. In an announcement Wednesday, Facebook said it will remove the accounts as part of a larger action against the Proud Boys, a far right organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group. The network was most active between 2015 and 2017, Facebook said, and promoted WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee in 2016. In one case in June 2016, one of the accounts advertised a link to an Infowars article about the release of the Democratic National Committee’s plan to combat Donald Trump’s candidacy. The effort consisted of 54 Facebook accounts, 50 pages and four Instagram accounts, including a number of […]

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Sweeping Russian disinformation effort relied on blog posts, social media to target Kremlin rivals

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A years-long propaganda effort that relied on thousands of blog articles and internet forgeries to discredit adversaries of Russian President Vladimir Putin is the latest reminder that Kremlin operatives are trying to influence foreign affairs, even if their level of success often is difficult to measure. Since 2014, Russian disinformation specialists have authored roughly 2,500 anonymous blog stories, social media posts and other techniques in an attempt to amplify Kremlin messaging, according to findings published Tuesday by social media analysis firm Graphika. The activity focused on a range of other topics long-favored by Russian propaganda, such as the Ukrainian government, former U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and the World Anti-Doping Agency. One facet of the campaign portrayed German Chancellor Angela Merkel as an alcoholic. Graphika describes the scheme as Operation Secondary Infektion, borrowing the name from a KGB plot which suggested the U.S. had invented the AIDS virus. While researchers noted […]

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Facebook removed white nationalist accounts encouraging guns at anti-racist protests

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Facebook removed multiple account networks connected with white nationalist hate groups that encouraged members to bring guns to anti-racism demonstrations throughout the United States. The social media company said Friday it removed sites affiliated with the Proud Boys and American Guard, which have been designated as extremist hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, respectively. Facebook removed roughly 30 accounts and 30 Instagram accounts belonging to the Proud Boys, which has appeared at white supremacist rallies like the Charlottesville demonstration in 2017. They also removed approximately 80 accounts and roughly 50 Instagram accounts from American Guard, who have advocated violence against immigrant and refugee communities. Both groups previously had been banned from Facebook, according to Brian Fishman, the company’s director of counterrorism and dangerous organizations. Facebook staff that had been monitoring both networks in an attempt to map their connections accelerated the account removals as […]

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Facebook announces it will flag state media posts, eventually decline ad dollars

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Facebook says it soon will begin labeling posts from state-controlled media outlets, an update praised by some disinformation researchers that comes after other social media firms have taken more aggressive steps to root out incendiary posts. Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, announced Thursday that the company will include notes on pages of media organizations that are “wholly or partially under the editorial control” of a government, as well as the outlets’ Ad Library Page and the Page Transparency section. Facebook also will apply labels to advertisements from state-controlled media outlets, a process that will not begin until U.S. election season accelerates. “State-controlled media outlets rarely advertise in the U.S.,” Gleicher wrote in a blog post explaining the update. “Nevertheless, later this summer we will begin blocking ads from these outlets in the U.S. out of an abundance of caution to provide an extra layer of protection against various […]

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Google finds Indian hack-for-hire firms exploiting coronavirus fears via spearphishing schemes

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Hack-for-hire firms in India have been impersonating the World Health Organization in credential-stealing spearphishing email campaigns, Google’s Threat Analysis Group said Wednesday. The hack-for-hire campaign, which has targeted healthcare companies, consulting firms, and financial services entities primarily in the U.S., Slovenia, Canada, Iran, Bahrain, and Cyprus, uses Gmail accounts imitating the WHO to direct victims to lookalike WHO websites. From there, victims are urged to sign up for healthcare alerts related to the coronavirus pandemic, according to Google. When signing up, however, users are prompted to reveal their Google account credentials or other personal information such as their cell phone numbers. It’s just the latest example of criminals and nation-state actors seizing upon the uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic to send spam emails purporting to have information from health authorities about the coronavirus, but are actually seeking to steal credentials or are laced with malware. Other spearphishing email campaigns have imitated the U.S. Centers […]

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