Throughout Europe, Russian spoofing campaigns are disseminating false information on Ukraine
October 25th, 2022 - Written By CyberLabs
A significant amount of social media posts and accounts that were spoofing Russian information was taken down by Meta’s security team in September 2022. The disinformation effort using fake websites, according to Meta, was the largest and most intricate Russian operation since the start of the war in Ukraine. The researchers saw a huge network of faked websites with an apparent high degree of linguistic proficiency, as well as a high level of sophistication and brute force. However, this campaign’s social media component relied on the more commonplace, less sophisticated techniques of deploying automated and fictitious accounts. Nevertheless, the fabricated news pieces were magnified by social media activity.
There are two sections to this campaign: Pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian narratives are promoted via spoof websites that are practically exact replicas of official media outlets in English, French, German, and other languages, and this content is widely shared on social media.
However, the goal of the social media proliferation was to make the content ubiquitous and generate clicks, not to create convincing false social media personalities, according to researchers, who found that the spoofing campaign was highly sophisticated while social media activity was less sophisticated. The top five Russia-driven narratives, as identified by the US State Department in January 2022, are reflected in the content of the spoof media websites.
These threat actors’ affiliated Telegram channels still distribute pro-Russian information. These threat actors want to change the trajectory of the war by potentially swaying political opinion against NATO and Western help to Ukraine. Russian threat actors are likely to launch new attempts to promote this kind of content if the situation worsens.
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