Category Archives: information operations

Facebook scrubs accounts spreading disinformation in Moldova ahead of heated election

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Facebook has removed nearly 200 accounts and pages for spreading fake news about Moldova ahead of an election that could deepen the divide between the country’s pro-Russian and pro-Western lawmakers. The social media company announced Wednesday it took 168 Facebook accounts, 28 pages and eight Instagram accounts offline for misleading users in Moldova about who they were. The pages posted frequently about political issues such as required Russian language education and  Moldova’s supposed reunification with Romania posed as a fact-checking organization or spread doctored photos, Facebook said. “Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our manual review found that some of this activity was linked to employees of the Moldovan government,” Facebook said. Roughly 54,000 accounts followed at least one of the pages Facebook has removed, and some 1,300 accounts followed one of the Instagram pages. Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, is scheduled to […]

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Atlantic Council holding worldwide events to combat the rise of disinformation

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You don’t need to look far to find an example of where disinformation had a profound effect on international politics. Consider Ireland’s abortion referendum, where foreign anti-abortion organizations targeted Irish social media users with specific ads. Or, last month, when Facebook announced it detected Russian propagandists masquerading as a Georgian fashion site. Or, of course, the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Incidents like this are why the Atlantic Council is organizing a series of events and listening sessions next month in Brussels, Madrid and Athens where security experts can advise international lawmakers on how to stifle influence efforts. The goal is to help world leaders recognize and act more quickly to stop campaigns to magnify false narratives like ones used in debates over the Catalonia policy, Brexit, Ireland’s abortion referendum and the 2016 election. “Western Europe and European Union countries once thought this is just a problem affecting the U.S. and Balkan […]

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Facebook removes nearly 800 pages for magnifying state media throughout the Middle East

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Facebook removed 783 pages, groups and accounts tied to Iran that engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” dating back to 2010, the company said Thursday. Many of the nearly 800 pages magnified content that originated with Iranian state media, such as news stories about relations between Israel and Palestine, the Syrian conflict and the impact of U.S. involvement in international conflicts, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a conference call Thursday. Roughly 2 million accounts followed at least one of these pages, and nearly $30,0000 in advertising spending was tied to the pages in question, Facebook said. Multiple sets of activity specifically targeted users in countries in the Middle East, European Union and Southeast Asia. The company did not directly tie any of the activities in question to the Iranian government. “In this case we can prove this is emanating from actors in Iran,” Gleicher said. “We’re not in a […]

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Sen. Warner calls for a ‘whole-of-society’ U.S. cyber doctrine

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Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election laid bare the vulnerabilities in American society and institutions to hacking and information operations. Two years later, policymakers are still searching for a comprehensive strategy for dealing with those vulnerabilities. In a speech Friday, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, proposed a “whole-of-society” cyber doctrine rather than one that treats the cybersecurity challenges in government and private sector separately. “It’s not enough to simply improve the security of our infrastructure, computer systems, and data,” Warner said at the Center for New American Security in Washington, D.C. “We must also deal with adversaries who are using American technologies to exploit our freedom, our openness, and basically attack our most important asset — our democracy.” Warner called on the U.S. to redouble its pursuit of global cyber norms; social-media companies to do more to combat disinformation; the Pentagon […]

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Foreign influence ops are adapting to U.S. defenses, DHS chief says

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Foreign adversaries are adapting their influence operations spreading disinformation to U.S. government and corporate defenses, making them more difficult to detect, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Friday. The Department of Homeland Security has worked with Facebook, for example, to combat influence operations (also known as information operations), but adversaries are modifying their behavior in response, according to Nielsen. “I think the nation-states have become aware of that [work], so what they are doing now is they will take otherwise legitimate content by a non-nation-state actor, and then they will amplify it in a way to continue that conversation,” she said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. Ahead of the midterm elections on Tuesday, Nielsen highlighted the department’s work since 2016 to make election infrastructure more secure from hackers. Election officials have many more security clearances, for example, and there is now a threat-sharing hub specific […]

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Why we’re still not ready for ‘like-war’

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American social media companies simply weren’t prepared for what hit them in 2016: a barrage of accounts spewing disinformation in an unrelenting influence operation against the U.S. presidential election. It was a subversion of Silicon Valley’s altruistic intent, a turning of America’s digital openness against itself. It was, as Peter Singer and Emerson Brooking explain in their eponymously titled book, “like-war.” “If cyberwar is the hacking of the networks, ‘like-war’ is the hacking of the people on the networks by driving ideas viral through likes and lies,” Singer said in an interview. While the Russian campaign to interfere in U.S. democracy involved plenty of hacking, “it was the ‘like-war’ side, the influence operation side, that gave it its impact,” he added. Tech companies may have been ready to defend their networks from hacking, but they were blindsided by the disinformation offensive, according to Singer, a senior fellow at New America, a […]

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Lawmakers ask intelligence community for ‘deepfakes’ assessment

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The intelligence community should assess how foreign governments could use so-called “deepfake” technology to harm U.S. national security interests, a bipartisan trio of lawmakers says. Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., and Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., wrote to the director of national intelligence Thursday, asking about technologies federal agencies or private companies could use to combat use of the content. Examples of it — including doctored videos involving famous people — have caught the public’s attention recently. “You have repeatedly raised the alarm about disinformation campaigns in our elections and other efforts to exacerbate political and social divisions in our society to weaken our nation,” the lawmakers wrote toDirector of National Intelligence Dan Coats. “We are deeply concerned that deep fake technology could soon be deployed by malicious foreign actors.” The rise of increasingly realistic deepfakes — video, audio, and images fueled by machine-learning algorithms and other tools — has prompted a conversation […]

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Google removes dozens of YouTube channels linked to ‘influence operation’

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Google removed dozens of YouTube channels, blogs and social media accounts linked to an “influence operation” allegedly sponsored by the Iranian government, the company announced on Thursday. Google also announced that it had recently notified Gmail users targeted by phishing campaigns from “a wide range of countries,” including Iran. Google linked the accounts to the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting and dated the operation back to at least January 2017. Based on the global nature of the activity, it appears the operations are not targeted at the U.S. midterm elections. The action followed Monday’s termination of hundreds of accounts on Facebook and Twitter linked to a group known as “Liberty Front Press,” an effort also tied to Iran. “Our technical research has identified evidence that these actors are associated with the IRIB, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting,” Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, said in a […]

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US National Counterintelligence and Security Center Releases 2018 Foreign Economic Espionage in Cyberspace Report

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National Counterintelligence and Security Center has released the Center’s 2018 espionage report detailing foreign spying within the confines of ‘cyberspace’. Both present and a modicum of future possibilities are covered. Enjoy!
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