Collaborate Disseminate
‘Ghosts in the Machine’ is a mix of bizarre and creepy images that sticks in the mind, but probably won’t send people running to the recruiter’s office. Continue reading Army’s New ‘Psyop’ Recruitment Ad Looks Like a Terrifying Video Game Cutscene
Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably they’ll lean heavily on the “think of the children!” rhetoric we’re… Continue reading UK Government to Launch PR Campaign Undermining End-to-End Encryption
Persuasion is as old as our species. Both democracy and the market economy depend on it. Politicians persuade citizens to vote for them, or to support different policy positions. Businesses persuade consumers to buy their products or services. We all p… Continue reading Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
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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Continue reading US seizes more domains with ties to suspected Iranian influence campaign
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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Continue reading US seizes more domains with ties to suspected Iranian influence campaign
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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Continue reading Why social media disinformation represents such a security threat
By Deeba Ahmed
The account holders were chattering about disrupting the first US Presidential Debate on Tuesday. Its only been a month when Microsoft warned about possible attempts of state-sponsored cybercriminals, particularly Iranian hackers, to dis… Continue reading Twitter removes Iranian accounts disrupting US presidential debate
Chinese social media accounts are not happy with President Donald Trump. A network of accounts on multiple platforms has been criticizing Trump and broadcasting more positive images of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, as part of an apparent campaign to rebuke the White House, according to a report published Wednesday by Graphika, a New York-based research firm. The network, which Graphika describes as “Spamouflage Dragon,” produces short videos on a near-daily basis on topics ranging from the Trump administration’s decision to prohibit the social media company TikTok in the U.S. to the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Whether the network was connected to the Chinese government remains unclear, Graphika said. Details of the campaign emerge after a U.S. intelligence assessment determined that Beijing was working to reduce the president’s reelection chances. “The network was active and public, but ultimately low-engagement,” the report stated. “It typically worked by using apparently […]
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Fireeye is reporting that a hacking group called Ghostwriter broke into the content management systems of Eastern European news sites to plant fake stories. From a Wired story: The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NATO and the US troops in Poland and the Baltics; they’ve posted fake content on… Continue reading Fake Stories in Real News Sites
A propaganda campaign is using the coronavirus pandemic to inflame anxieties about NATO troops throughout Eastern Europe, security researchers have determined. The group, dubbed Ghostwriter, has been focused on amplifying anti-Western narratives in Poland, Latvia and Lithuania since 2017. Operatives have planted fabricated diplomatic documents, tried spreading the false narrative that Canadian soldiers had been spreading COVID-19 through Latvia and leveraged news sites to spread articles that appear to be legitimate, according to a report the security firm FireEye published Tuesday. While researchers have not attributed the effort to the Russian government, the findings are the latest addition to a growing consensus that pro-Kremlin entities are seizing on COVID-19 to inflame existing political divisions. Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, is using three websites to try to spread disinformation about the U.S. response to the virus, U.S. officials told the Associated Press. “We believe the assets and operations…are for the […]
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