Carbon Chemist

Tag: russia

  • Ukrainian Sailors Are Using Telegram to Avoid Being Tricked Into Smuggling Oil for Russia

    Ukrainian Sailors Are Using Telegram to Avoid Being Tricked Into Smuggling Oil for Russia

    [ad_1]

    This story originally appeared in Hakai Magazine and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    A new video appears on the social media network Telegram: footage of the smoking area aboard a large vessel. The curtains are ripped, the lights are broken, and ash and glass litter the floor. “This is how they drink on our ship,” says the young Ukrainian deck worker filming the scene, turning to show the furniture thrown to the corner of the room. “I’m freaked out.”

    A Telegram administrator asks the deck worker if he can share the vessel’s name. They change the ship’s name multiple times a year, replies Feliks Bondar, whose own name has been changed for this story. “I don’t even know what name to tell you,” he writes in Ukrainian. “Our ship was originally called Eagle, but in Venezuela, we were Matador and then Shoyo Maru.”

    A chorus of similar messages had flooded the chat in recent months: stories of dangerously rundown ships, operators withholding pay, abandoned crew members, and vessel owners changing ship names or manipulating their automatic identification systems (AIS)—the global network meant to help ships recognize each other.

    The Telegram group hosts over 8,000 sailors. Some are fresh out of maritime college, others are seasoned captains. All are drawn to the group by a desire to stay safe on the high seas. By telling their stories and naming names—when they can—these sailors have been gathering information about problematic vessels, detailing everything from those with low-quality food to ships where crews often experience pay delays.

    But in recent years, as more sailors are finding themselves unwittingly involved in the so-called shadow fleet—smuggling oil for Iran, Russia, or other clients that have been hit by strict sanctions to restrict their sales of oil—the social media whisper network has evolved. As well as a place to find a reputable employer, it’s become something else: a way for seafarers to avoid helping the other side of a war.

    Life as a contract seafarer has never been easy. Workers frequently hop from ship to ship, contract to contract, and country to country. But the rise of the shadow fleet—along with Russia’s war in Ukraine—poses a new kind of risk.

    About a year and a half ago, in early 2023, Bondar sought out the seafarers’ Telegram network after a particularly troubling gig. Booked to the job by an Ukraine-based crewing agency, Bondar found that the name of his assigned vessel had been painted over, and the AIS was, once again, unplugged. A note on top of the device warned seafarers not to turn it on.

    After a six-month voyage smuggling sanctioned oil to China, Bondar says the crew was told its next operation would begin in Koz’mino, Russia. Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine had begun while he was at sea and had already been underway for over four months. Bondar and the other Ukrainians on board refused to work smuggling Russian oil. The ship’s operator allegedly fired them all, ditching them at the nearest port in China.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Apple Is Coming for Your Password Manager

    Apple Is Coming for Your Password Manager

    [ad_1]

    That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference next week, the company will reportedly announce its own stand-alone password manager that will compete with apps like 1Password and LastPass. Dubbed simply Passwords, according to Bloomberg News, the app will reportedly have features that go well beyond the iCloud or Mac Keychain tools Apple already offers, allowing users to save passwords for Wi-Fi networks, store passkeys, and organize login credentials into categories. Passwords will also reportedly work on Windows machines, but it’s unclear whether people who use Android devices can get in on the security tool.

    US prosecutors on Monday charged an executive at The Epoch Times newspaper with carrying out a massive money-laundering scheme. According to the US Department of Justice, Epoch Times chief financial officer Weidong “Bill” Guan engaged in “a transnational scheme to launder at least approximately $67 million of illegally obtained funds to benefit himself and the media company.”

    The scheme, according to the indictment against Guan, largely involved using cryptocurrency to purchase prepaid debit cards “loaded with US dollars that had been obtained through various frauds”—including funds obtained through unemployment benefits fraud—for less than the funds on the prepaid debit cards. The purchase of the cards was carried out by members of The Epoch Times’ “Make Money Online” team, which Guan managed, according to the DOJ. The so-called MMO team would allegedly then use “stolen personal identification information” to open various accounts, which were used to transfer money from the prepaid debit cards to bank accounts associated with The Epoch Times and its employees. Guan faces one count of conspiring to commit money laundering, two counts of bank fraud, and could face decades in prison if convicted.

    Google’s former CEO, billionaire Eric Schmidt, is quietly building a military drone company, reports Forbes. The company, called White Stork, has been testing devices at both its Hillspire office complex in Menlo Park, California, and in Ukraine. Relatively little has been publicly revealed about the company or the specifics of its technology. According to Forbes, however, “individuals flying small drones” have been spotted near the Hillspire property, and Schmidt has reportedly hired alumni from Google, SpaceX, and Apple to carry out his secretive project, providing some clues about its ambitions.

    A cyberattack against an organization that facilitates blood transfusions and other sensitive medical care disrupted hospitals and other health care entities across London this week. The attack targeted Synnovis, which manages a partnership between King’s College Hospitals trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital trust, and Synlab, a European medical testing firm. In a statement published on Tuesday, Synnovis said the attack “has affected all Synnovis IT systems, resulting in interruptions to many of our pathology services.” This forced hospitals to cancel surgeries involving blood transfusions and other procedures. Ciaran Martin, a former top UK cybersecurity official, blamed the attack on Qilin, a cybercriminal gang believed to have ties to Russia.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Russia Is Targeting Germany With Fake Information as Europe Votes

    Russia Is Targeting Germany With Fake Information as Europe Votes

    [ad_1]

    With European Union elections underway, Germany is the EU country most under attack by Russian disinformation campaigns, a spokesperson for the European Commission tells WIRED.

    The warning comes days before Germany votes in EU elections on Sunday and during a campaign season marred by a string of violent attacks against German politicians.

    “Most cases in our database are related to Germany, which means it is the country in the EU which is most targeted by disinformation,” says Peter Stano, the European Commission’s lead spokesperson for foreign affairs and security policy.

    Numerous instances of Russian disinformation targeting Germany are listed on the public disinformation database run by the EU’s diplomatic service. One example references an April case where fake news articles purporting to be published by German magazine Der Spiegel spread on the social platform X. When users clicked on the articles, which criticized the German government, they were taken to the website Spiegel.ltd instead of the magazine’s official domain, Spiegel.de. Although the links no longer work, at least two accounts that shared the fake articles are still online. X did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

    “What we are fighting and defending ourselves against is this foreign interference and information manipulation coming from Russia,” Stano says of the threats facing the EU election this weekend. These disinformation campaigns, Stano says, can be linked to Russia because they either link or refer to Russian state media that is controlled by the Kremlin.

    Germany “is the biggest member state of the EU by population, and in the public perception it’s the one that drives policymaking in the EU,” says Stano. Russia is attempting to exacerbate divisions that already exist in Germany, he adds, such as the economic differences between east and west, as well as the country’s “Putinversteher,” or Putin-sympathizers, a term used to describe sections of Germany’s political class who express sympathy with the Russian president.

    Fact-checkers working for the independent media group Correctiv have also identified videos on Tiktok that falsely claim Germany is preparing to enter the war in Ukraine, and another video on Telegram and Facebook falsely claiming to show protesters clashing with police in Mannheim after a police officer was stabbed and killed last week.

    Tensions are already high in Germany ahead of the election. Earlier this week, a politician from the far-right AFD party was stabbed in the city of Mannheim. Last month, a candidate from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left SPD party was hospitalized after he was attacked while putting up posters. A Green Party candidate was also verbally and physically assaulted.

    On Thursday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to counter political violence, whether it comes from the far left or far right. “Security is the cornerstone of our freedom, our democracy, and our rule of law,” he said in a speech in Berlin. Germany’s foreign office did not reply to a request for comment on the impact disinformation was having on the election campaign.

    The European Commission has a team of around 40 people who are tracking online disinformation. They have a budget of around €20 million to track Russian activities across platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Telegram, and Instagram and flag their findings to EU member states.

    Compared to Russia, their budget is nothing, says Stano. “We assume they are spending €1 billion on disinformation,” he added, explaining that the European Commission had come to this estimate based on publicly available data about allocations in Russia’s state budget for state-run media and communication activities.

    The EU has also been closely tracking how social media companies respond to Russian attempts to manipulate discussion on their platforms. In April, the bloc’s regulators launched a formal investigation into Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to see whether the platform was complying with its obligations to prevent the dissemination of disinformation campaigns. “We suspect that Meta’s moderation is insufficient,” top commission official Margrethe Vestager said at the time.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Russians Love YouTube. That’s a Problem for the Kremlin

    Russians Love YouTube. That’s a Problem for the Kremlin

    [ad_1]

    Milov stresses that YouTube isn’t just a one-way service: Because it allows users to comment and chat anonymously, it provides an extraordinary chance for regular Russians to express themselves without fear of censorship.

    “The amount of our feedback is enormous,” he says. “Just myself, alone, I literally get messages, every day, from at least hundreds of people from across the country. When something serious happens? Thousands.” Sometimes, Milov says, his first indication that something terrible has happened in Russia is seeing just how many unread messages he has in his YouTube inbox.

    Milov says this feedback reinforces the idea, supported even by Kremlin-approved pollsters, that opposition to the war in Ukraine is growing. But it also provides some important details and nuance. “So this is like, I would say, an enormous focus group, with which you can also communicate. You can ask them questions back.” He chuckles, thinking of the notorious Russian security and intelligence agency: “You know, the FSB would kill for this kind of information.”

    “Obviously, the question is, why didn’t Putin shut down YouTube?” Milov says. “It’s easier said than done.”

    In recent years, Moscow has deployed an array of strategies to cow and kill independent media and the open internet in Russia. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have been blocked altogether. Independent media like Meduza, TV Rain, and The Insider have been declared “undesirable” or labeled “foreign agents.”

    Through it all, YouTube has survived.

    Milov says the Kremlin was too slow to move on YouTube. By the time Moscow was banning other popular Western platforms, the Google-owned video platform had become indispensable to everyday Russians. “They kind of let the genie out of the bottle,” Milov says.

    “YouTube is mommies showing cartoons to kids, teenagers are watching music videos, people are watching comedians, elderly folks watching old Soviet movies, which are widely available there, and so on,” he says. “And you shut it all down? So you have these empty evenings now, from this point on.”

    Unable to disrupt YouTube, the Kremlin tried desperately to compete with it.

    Moscow had high hopes for Rutube, a long-suffering YouTube clone which was relaunched in 2020 after a merger with the media arm of state-controlled energy giant Gazprom. If the site’s “top videos” section is to be believed, it hasn’t worked—some had racked up view counts in the mid-thousands.

    VK, Russia’s answer to Facebook, has fared slightly better with its video-sharing platform, and it is rife with pro-Kremlin broadcasters. But even its most popular channels have just a tiny fraction of the biggest Russian-language YouTube accounts.

    “It’s like a big room, but it’s empty,” Milov says of these Kremlin-backed alternatives.

    Having failed to compete with his online critics, Milov believes Putin opted for a more direct strategy. Just days before I arrived in Vilnius, thugs appeared outside the home of Leonid Volkov, former chair of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Nalvany chief of staff. Armed with hammers, they savagely beat him. Lithuanian intelligence believe the men arrested were operating on orders from Russia. A week after the attack, Volkov was back on YouTube, his arm in a sling, “I am not going to stop—although I will gesticulate less in the coming weeks,” he said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Foreign Influence Campaigns Don’t Know How to Use AI Yet Either

    Foreign Influence Campaigns Don’t Know How to Use AI Yet Either

    [ad_1]

    Today, OpenAI released its first threat report, detailing how actors from Russia, Iran, China, and Israel have attempted to use its technology for foreign influence operations across the globe. The report named five different networks that OpenAI identified and shut down between 2023 and 2024. In the report, OpenAI reveals that established networks like Russia’s Doppleganger and China’s Spamoflauge are experimenting with how to use generative AI to automate their operations. They’re also not very good at it.

    And while it’s a modest relief that these actors haven’t mastered generative AI to become unstoppable forces for disinformation, it’s clear that they’re experimenting, and that alone should be worrying.

    The OpenAI report reveals that influence campaigns are running up against the limits of generative AI, which doesn’t reliably produce good copy or code. It struggles with idioms— which make language sound more reliably human and personal—and also sometimes with basic grammar (so much so that OpenAI named one network “Bad Grammar.”) The Bad Grammar network was so sloppy that it once revealed its true identity: “As an AI language model, I am here to assist and provide the desired comment,” it posted.

    One network used ChatGPT to debug code that would allow it to automate posts on Telegram, a chat app that has long been a favorite of extremists and influence networks. This worked well sometimes, but other times it led to the same account posting as two separate characters, giving away the game.

    In other cases, ChatGPT was used to create code and content for websites and social media. Spamoflauge, for instance, used ChatGPT to debug code to create a WordPress website that published stories attacking members of the Chinese diaspora who were critical of the country’s government.

    According to the report, the AI-generated content didn’t manage to break out from the influence networks themselves into the mainstream, even when shared on widely used platforms like X, Facebook, or Instagram. This was the case for campaigns run by an Israeli company seemingly working on a for-hire basis, and posting content that ranged from anti-Qatar to anti-BJP, the Hindu-nationalist party currently in control of the Indian government.

    Taken altogether, the report paints a picture of several relatively ineffective campaigns with crude propaganda, seemingly allaying fears that many experts have had about the potential for this new technology to spread mis- and disinformation, particularly during a crucial election year.

    But influence campaigns on social media often innovate over time to avoid detection, learning the platforms and their tools, sometimes better than the employees of the platforms themselves. While these initial campaigns may be small or ineffective they appear to be still in the experimental stage, says Jessica Walton, a researcher with the CyberPeace Institute who has studied Doppleganger’s use of generative AI.

    In her research, the network would use real-seeming Facebook profiles to post articles, often around divisive political topics. “The actual articles are written by generative AI,” she says. “And mostly what they’re trying to do is see what will fly, what Meta’s algorithms will and won’t be able to catch.”

    In other words, expect them only to get better from here.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Russian Disinfo Campaign Blames Ukraine for Shooting of Slovakia’s Prime Minister

    Russian Disinfo Campaign Blames Ukraine for Shooting of Slovakia’s Prime Minister

    [ad_1]

    Russia Today’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan went further in a comment on her Telegram channel, blaming Ukraine for the attack: “The Slovak Prime Minister is injured. The one who said that the war began as a result of rampant Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Putin had no other choice. That’s how they work.”

    Logically, a company that tracks disinformation campaigns, assessed more than 100 Russian-language pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and found they were uniformly claiming the attack was motivated by Fico’s “pro-Russian stance” while also claiming that Western media outlets were justifying the attack because of Fico’s lack of support for Ukraine.

    The Telegram channel of military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk, which has 1.2 million subscribers, claimed that it was highly likely that a “Ukrainian trace” will emerge in the attack on Fico. The post has been viewed over 300,000 times. The official Telegram channel of Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claimed that Fico is “known as a friend of Russia.”

    “It is likely that Russian language channels and Russian disinformation operations will use the attempted assassination of Fico as a new theme to claim that the West supports violence against pro-Russian politicians, and more broadly to expand on the already present narrative that the world engages in widespread ‘Russophobia,’” Kyle Walter, director of research at Logically, tells WIRED.

    Most of the posts on X linking the assassination to Ukraine were in English, not Slovak, says Dominika Hajdu, the policy director at the think tank Globsec, speaking from Slovakia’s capital Bratislava. “With the assassination attempts, I haven’t seen any accusations [on social media] in Slovak linking the assassination to Ukraine or Russia.” These English-language posts, she says, imply a target audience of international users, not Slovaks.

    Fico is a divisive figure in Slovakia, a small EU country situated between Austria and Ukraine. Considered Russia-friendly, the 59-year-old was reelected for the third time in October, following a campaign in which Fico called for the withdrawal of military support for Ukraine, while saying he could never support the idea of LGBTQ marriage. Since his Smer–SD party won the election, he has proposed shutting the country’s anti-corruption office and has been accused of cracking down on civil rights groups and limiting press freedom.

    “The typical current government supporter is mostly rural, usually an older voter, who is not super thrilled with how things turned out with their economic success,” says Sona Muzikarova, a senior fellow at The Atlantic Council focused on Central and Eastern Europe. “On the other side is the more liberal, a bit more woke, pro-EU, pro western, urban voter.”

    More liberal voters were unhappy with the return of Fico, whose last period in power ended with his resignation in 2018, following huge demonstrations over the killing of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. Kuciak had been uncovering government corruption.

    “He got voted in through a democratic process, but still there is a huge chunk of the population that’s very unhappy with this kind of person being in the lead again,” adds Muzikarova.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The US Election Threats Are Clear. What to Do About Them Is Anything But

    The US Election Threats Are Clear. What to Do About Them Is Anything But

    [ad_1]

    On Wednesday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee questioned senior national security officials on how they plan to respond to attacks on voting infrastructure and attempts to influence the election using deepfakes, generative AI, and misinformation. While everyone in the room appeared to agree on what the threats are, senators expressed concern about how exactly government agencies would respond.

    In a wide-ranging session, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly, and FBI Executive Assistant Director Larissa focused especially on the wide availability of increasingly sophisticated AI tools that make it easier for more people to create convincing and deceptive fake videos and audio. Senators pressed them on what they would do if one of those AI-generated fakes went viral in the heat of a presidential election.

    “I don’t think I have a clearer understanding of who’s in charge and how we would respond,” said Marco Rubio, senator from Florida and vice chair of the committee. “I don’t want there to be any gray area.”

    Haines pointed to a US government “notification framework,” that provides guidance for making public disclosures while considering sensitive intelligence collection methods used by the US government.

    Building off of Rubio’s question, committee chair Mark Warner, senator from Virginia, praised the response by the Trump administration after Iranian linked actors posed as the Proud Boys in an attempt to intimate voters. In an unprecedented move at the time, senior law enforcement and intelligence officials publicly attributed the impersonation to Iranian-linked actors within days.

    Senator Angus King of Maine called the framework “a bureaucratic nightmare,” and pushed for faster disclosure of influence efforts.

    “What I want to urge is disclosure of sources when you’re aware of it immediately,” King said.

    Haines responded that the framework may “sound quite bureaucratic,” but that the government has been able to expedite its decision-making process to happen in as quickly as two days.

    Warner noted that it’s now easier than ever for other countries to attempt to interfere in elections. “The barriers to entry for foreign malign influence—including election influence—have become almost vanishingly small,” Warner said. “The scale and sophistication of these sorts of attacks against our elections can be accelerated several-fold by what are now cutting-edge AI tools.”

    He also criticized efforts to downplay the severity of election interference in 2016. “I think there has been some rewriting post-2016 that somehow some of the activities in Russia, or even in 2020 with Iran, that was kind of harmless trolling,” Warner said.

    Haines agreed, pointing to Iran as an example of a foreign actor making serious attempts to sow discord among Americans.

    “[Iran is] increasingly aggressive in their efforts seeking to stoke this kind of discord and promote chaos and undermine confidence in the integrity of the process and they use social media platforms, really, to issue threats, [and] to disseminate disinformation,” she said.

    And Iran’s not alone; the officials gave an overview of other countries seeking to influence the upcoming presidential election. Haines said that Russia “remains the most active foreign threat to our elections.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Microsoft Deploys Generative AI for US Spies

    Microsoft Deploys Generative AI for US Spies

    [ad_1]

    Law enforcement in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia this week named a Russian national as the person behind LockBitSupp, the pseudonym of the leader of the LockBit ransomware gang that the US says is responsible for extracting $500 million from its victims. Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev has been sanctioned and charged with 26 criminal counts in the US, which combined could result in a prison sentence of 185 years. That is, if he’s ever arrested and successfully prosecuted—an extremely rare event for suspects who live in Russia.

    Elsewhere in the world of cybercrime, WIRED’s Andy Greenberg interviewed a representative of Cyber Army of Russia, a group of hackers who have targeted water utilities in the US and Europe and are said to have ties to the notorious Russian military hacking unit known as Sandworm. The responses from Cyber Army of Russia were littered with pro-Kremlin talking points—and some curious admissions.

    A deputy director of the FBI has urged the agency’s employees to continue to use a massive foreign surveillance database to search for the communications of “US persons,” sparking the ire of privacy and civil liberty advocates who unsuccessfully fought for such searches to require a warrant. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires that “targets” of the surveillance program be based outside the US, but the texts, emails, and phone call of people in the US can be included in the 702 database if one of the parties involved in the communication is foreign. An amendment that would have required the FBI to obtain a warrant for 702 searches of US persons failed in a tie vote earlier this year.

    Security researchers this week revealed an attack on VPNs that forces some or all of a user’s web traffic to be routed outside the encrypted tunnel, thus negating the entire reason for using a VPN. Dubbed “TunnelVision,” the attack impacts nearly all VPN applications, and the researchers say the attack has been possible since 2022, meaning it’s possible that it’s already been used by malicious actors.

    That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    Microsoft has developed an offline generative AI model designed specifically to handle top-secret information for US intelligence agencies, according to Bloomberg. This system, based on GPT-4, is isolated from the internet and only accessible through a network exclusive to the US government. William Chappell, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for strategic missions and technology, told Bloomberg that, theoretically, around 10,000 individuals could access the system.

    Although spy agencies are eager to leverage the capabilities of generative AI, concerns have been raised about the potential unintended leakage of classified information, as these systems typically rely on online cloud services for data processing. However, Microsoft claims that the model it created for the US government is “clean,” meaning it can read files without learning from them, preventing secret information from being integrated into the platform. Bloomberg noted that this marks the first time a major large language model has operated entirely offline.

    Sky News reported this week that Britain’s Ministry of Defence was the target of a significant cyberattack on its third-party payroll system. On Tuesday, Grant Shapps, the UK defence secretary, informed members of Parliament that payroll records of approximately 270,000 current and former military personnel, including their home addresses, had been accessed in the cyberattack. “State involvement” could not be ruled out, he said.

    While the government has not publicly identified a specific country involved, Sky News has reported that the Chinese government is suspected. China’s foreign ministry has denied the allegations, saying in a statement that it “firmly opposes and fights all forms of cyber attacks” and “rejects the use of this issue politically to smear other countries.”

    The payroll company, Shared Services Connected, had known about the breach for months before reporting it to the government, according to The Guardian.

    The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is testing robotic dogs that can be armed with artificial-intelligence-enabled gun systems. According to reporting from The War Zone, the manufacturer of the AI gun system, Onyx Industries, confirmed to reporters at a defense conference this week that as many as two of MARSOC’s robot dogs, developed by Ghost Robotics, are equipped with its weapons systems.

    In a statement to The War Zone, MARSOC clarified that the robot dogs are “under evaluation” and are not yet being deployed in the field. They noted that weapons are just one possible application for the technology, which could also be used for surveillance and reconnaissance. MARSOC emphasized that they are fully compliant with US Department of Defense policies on autonomous weapons.

    The US Marine Corps has previously tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers.

    Days after a hacker posted to BreachForums offering to sell data from nearly 50 million Dell customers, the company began notifying its customers of a data breach in a company portal. According to the email sent to the people impacted, the leaked data contains names, addresses, and information about purchased hardware. “The information involved does not include financial or payment information, email address, telephone number or any highly sensitive customer information,” the email to affected customers states.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • A Russian Influence Campaign Is Exploiting College Campus Protests

    A Russian Influence Campaign Is Exploiting College Campus Protests

    [ad_1]

    X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

    The posts did not receive a huge amount of engagement, but unlike China’s disinformation campaigns, some seemingly authentic users did respond to the posts. One responded by writing “Fuck Palestine,” while another reacted with an image saying: “Free Palestine.”

    The covert Doppelganger campaign echoed narratives pushed by overt Russian channels including Telegram groups and state-run media, which have spent the last week highlighting the “threat of deadly police violence against demonstrators” and linking the current protests to the Kent State protests in 1970 when four students were shot and killed by the National Guard. While there have been over 2,000 arrests at campus protests in the US so far, protests have largely been peaceful and no one has been killed.

    On Facebook, Sputnik wrote: “‘Land of the Free? How US Lawmakers Restrict Students’ Right to Peaceful Protest: US lawmakers have once again demonstrated where their sympathies lie in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by cracking down on student protests against the bloodbath in the Gaza Strip.”

    The coordinated campaign has also been taking place on Telegram, where Russian influencers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers have been amplifying content surrounding the protests. In one channel, a military blogger with over 800,000 followers posted videos showing police on campuses across the US claiming it showed “urban warfare training.” In one comment on the video, a subscriber asked when the conflict will begin: “North against South, crips against bloods, donkeys against elephants, and everyone against everyone.” The post has been viewed over 250,000 times.

    The Telegram channels appear to coordinate around a narrative that accuses the US government of hypocrisy when it comes to freedom to protest and organize, according to analysis shared with WIRED by Logically, a company using artificial intelligence to track disinformation campaigns.

    “As the 2024 US election nears, this is another example of signals emerging from Russian language channels indicating Russia is turning its access to domestic US issues after nearly two years of focusing largely on Ukraine,” Kyle Walter, Global Head of Investigative Research at Innovation at Logically, tells WIRED.

    Russia is not alone in this. Together with China and Iran, state media in the three countries have produced nearly 400 articles in English about the campus protests in the space of two weeks, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation online. These governments have also used social media platforms in an official capacity to boost their narratives: A post on X from Nasser Kanaani, a spokesman for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, depicted a student protester with the caption “Imprisonment of #freedom in the U.S.A.”

    Disinformation around the protests has not been limited to foreign actors, and US-based far-right figures have boosted numerous conspiracies around Soros and others funding the protests, including buying students tents—which have been repeated in mainstream outlets. But Russia is now seeking to build on those narratives:

    “Doppelganger is using pre-existing conspiracies about the protests and adopting and expanding it for Kremlin’s own purposes, using multiple avenues for increasing support for Trump, while amplifying pre-existing and adding its own criticism of Biden,” the Antibot4Navalny researchers tell WIRED.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • A (Strange) Interview the Russian-Military-Linked Hackers Targeting US Water Utilities

    A (Strange) Interview the Russian-Military-Linked Hackers Targeting US Water Utilities

    [ad_1]

    She later added, somewhat confusingly, that “the Sandworm hacker group does have something in common [with us] … This is the commander-in-chief of our Cyber Army.” It wasn’t clear, however, whether that comment was referring to a shared leader overseeing the two groups—or even a kind of imagined ideological leader such as Russian president Vladimir Putin—or whether Julia meant that Sandworm itself gives the Cyber Army its orders, in contradiction to her previous statements. Julia didn’t respond to WIRED’s requests for clarification on that question or, in fact, to any questions following that comment.

    A Hacktivist Hype Machine

    Russian information warfare and influence operations experts with whom WIRED shared the full text of the interview noted that, despite Cyber Army of Russia’s claims of acting as an independent grassroots organization, it closely adheres to both Russian government talking points as well the Russian military’s published information warfare doctrine. The group’s rhetoric about changing “minds and hearts” beyond the front lines of a conflict through attacks targeting civilian infrastructure mirrors a well-known paper on “information confrontation” by Russian military general Valery Gerasimov, for instance. Other portions of Julia’s comments—an unprompted polemic against “non-traditional sexual relations” and a description of Russia as a conservative cultural “Noah’s Ark of the 21st century”—echo similar statements made by Russian leaders and Russian state media.

    None of that proves that Cyber Army of Russia has anything more than the thin ties to the GRU that Mandiant uncovered, says Gavin Wilde, a Russia-focused senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He argues instead that the group’s comments appear to be an attempt to score points with a potential government sponsor, perhaps in the hopes of gaining a more official relationship. “They’re really trying to hone their messaging, but not for a Western audience, necessarily, so much as to try to put points on the board domestically and with potential political or financial benefactors in Moscow,” he says.

    At one point in the interview with WIRED, in fact, Julia explicitly voiced that request for more official government support. “I really hope that the People’s Cyber Army of Russia will have great prospects, that our government agencies will not just pay attention to us, but support our actions, both financially and through the formation of full-fledged cyber troops as part of the Russian Armed Forces,” she wrote.

    Outside of the conversation with WIRED, Cyber Army of Russia posts to its Telegram channel in Russian, not English—a strange move for a group that claims to be trying to influence Western politics in its favor. Other Russian influence operations created by the GRU itself, such as the Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks fronts created to influence the 2016 presidential election, wrote in English. Even other “hacktivist” groups targeting civilian critical infrastructure, such as Israel-linked Predatory Sparrow, take credit for their attacks in the language of their targets—in Predatory Sparrow’s case, posting to Telegram in Persian in an apparent attempt to influence Iranians.

    [ad_2]

    Source link