Category Archives: information operations

‘Typosquatting’ campaign imitated news outlets to spread propaganda for years, report says

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Researchers have uncovered a years-long disinformation campaign in which suspected Iranian operatives masqueraded as well known international media outlets and used fake Twitter accounts to amplify fabricated news articles. The group, dubbed Endless Mayfly, published some 135 news articles on sites meant to look like Bloomberg, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Politico and others, according to findings published Tuesday by Citizen Lab, the team of researchers at the University of Toronto. The group impersonated outlets via a technique known as “typosquatting,” in which it used websites like “theatlatnic.com” instead of “theatlantic.com” to avoid detection. Endless Mayfly would use this method to push anti-Saudi narratives and other fabrications that would be picked up on social media and legitimate news outlets, Citizen Lab said. It also involved the use of 11 Twitter personas since 2016. The effort demonstrates how propagandists have adopted the SEO and social media tactics that media outlets and other organizations […]

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FBI director: Protecting 2018 election was a ‘dress rehearsal’ for 2020

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Protecting the 2018 U.S. midterm elections from foreign meddling was a “dress rehearsal for the big show” of the 2020 presidential elections, which adversaries are expected to target, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Friday. “Our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game,” Wray said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, adding that multiple nation-states have learned from Russia’s influence operations in the 2016 presidential election. After the sweeping Russian intervention in 2016 – which also included probing voter databases and breaching and disseminating thousands of Democratic Party emails– federal agencies put an unprecedented amount of resources into defending the 2018 midterms. The 2018 vote passed without any “material impact or interference” on election or campaign infrastructure, Wray said Friday as he hailed “enormous strides” in election security. Now, all eyes are on 2020. If foreign intelligence agencies already have their sights on the 2020 […]

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Facebook links Duterte campaign volunteer to 200 bogus accounts

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Facebook says it has removed another 200 pages for misleading users about who was behind the content and for misrepresenting what the pages were supposed to achieve. This time the pages, groups and accounts were located in the Philippines. Facebook has tied the activity to a network organized by Nic Gabunada, a businessman who said he managed social media for Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte during his 2016 campaign. A bulletin published Thursday is the latest such update from the company, which in recent weeks has removed accounts from Iran, Russia, Moldova and elsewhere for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook’s moves have been closely watched by political organizations, intelligence agencies, law enforcement and other entities with an interest in election security or information operations. The identification of Gabunada, former chief executive of Omnicom Media Group Philippines, marks a departure for Facebook, which says it removes accounts based on their behavior, but that it doesn’t have the capability […]

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Facebook removes accounts for masquerading as news outlets in the Middle East

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Facebook has removed 2,632 pages, groups and accounts for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” including misrepresenting their origin and using fake accounts, the company said Tuesday. The information operations were connected to Iran, Russia, Macedonia and Kosovo, Facebook said. Researchers said the activity engaged in many of the same behaviors, typically magnifying state media propaganda, but cautioned they did not find any links between the operations. In recent months, Facebook has announced similar takedowns of accounts targeting users in Moldova and for spreading disinformation in the Middle East. “While we are making progress rooting out this abuse, as we’ve said before, it’s an ongoing challenge because the people responsible are determined and well-funded,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a blog post. Facebook typically does not directly attribute such activity to governments or other specific groups, saying it does not have the capability to determine exactly who […]

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Kremlin interference in EU vote is likely, says Estonian spy agency

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Estonia’s foreign intelligence agency says it is “very likely” that the Russian government will try to interfere in the European Union parliamentary elections in May. The Kremlin’s meddling will likely focus on France, Germany and Italy, which hold the most EU parliamentary seats, in a concerted effort to “secure as many seats as possible for pro-Russian or euro-skeptical political forces,” the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service said Tuesday in an external security report focused on threats from Russia. The European Parliament’s status as the only EU institution directly elected by the people makes it a prime target for Russian influence operations, the EFIS said, adding that the proportional election system favors marginal parties and that Members of European Parliament (MEPs) can be used as mouthpieces for Russian propaganda. The Kremlin has wooed European politicians by inviting them to a 2016 conference in the Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, the report […]

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Nearly 6,000 Twitter accounts magnified recent far-right messaging on Brexit, F-Secure says

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Far-right Twitter accounts apparently originating in the U.S. amplified pro-Brexit propaganda between December and February and December, according to research published Tuesday by F-Secure, a Finnish cybersecurity company. An analysis of 24 million tweets related to Brexit from 1.65 million users uncovered “inorganic” activity on both sides of the debate, though disinformation was “far more” frequent in among supporters of the United Kingdom’s scheduled withdrawal from the European Union. “At the very least, our research shows there’s a global effort amongst the far-right to amplify the ‘leave’ side of the debate,” Andy Patel, a senior researcher with F-Secure’s Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence, said in a statement Tuesday. Researchers determined that several separate accounts retweeted messages from @Brexiteer30, @UnityNewsNet and @JackBMontgomery, an editor with the alt-right Breitbart News. Nearly 6,000 accounts magnified messages from those three far-right accounts, F-Secure found. Many of those pages also included some version of #MakeAmericaGreatAgain […]

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Facebook purges accounts for spreading hate speech, this time in the U.K. and Romania

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Facebook says it shut down dozens of accounts, pages and groups intended to “engage in hate speech and spread divisive comments on both sides of the political debate” in the United Kingdom and in Romania. It’s the latest announcement in the social media giant’s campaign to reduce “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on sites that it owns. In a news release Thursday, the company said 23 pages, 74 Facebook accounts, 5 groups, and 35 Instagram accounts were affected in the U.K. sweep. A separate four pages, 26 Facebook accounts, and one group were shut down in Romania. “We didn’t find any links between these sets of activities, but they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing,” Facebook said. The company did not specify who ran the operations. The perpetrators’ general goal in the U.K. was political disruption, Facebook said, […]

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A bot doesn’t need to talk like a bot for Twitter to notice

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Twitter is tracking accounts’ behavior — and not necessarily the content they disseminate — to determine whether a user is misrepresenting their identity, a possible indication the account is used to amplify information operations. The approach is an attempt to solve a problem that keeps changing as nation-states look for any edge in cyberspace. While hackers continue to breach international networks to steal trade secrets and conduct espionage, they also use trusted social media outlets to exploit users in a way that is re-defining cyberwar, according to a panel of experts at the RSA cybersecurity conference. “This practice … may be having a greater outcome than what we think of as traditional cybersecurity,” said political scientist Peter W. Singer. “Is [cybersecurity] about critical infrastructure, or the poisoning of democracies?” Twitter examines accounts by assessing whether they are part of a larger network of users pushing the same types of information, […]

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