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  • Russia’s Online Campaign to Destroy Yulia Navalnaya

    Russia’s Online Campaign to Destroy Yulia Navalnaya

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    Over the next couple of days after news of Navalny’s death, Solovyov shared more content designed to suggest Navalnaya was having an affair, including a doctored image that appeared to show Navalnaya embracing Russian entrepreneur Evgeny Chichvarkin, who in the past has financed Navalny’s work.

    The original image, taken in 2013, shows Navalnaya embracing her husband after he was released from jail. The doctored image has been in circulation for several years, with Reset’s researchers finding examples of it being shared online in 2021. The fake image has been widely debunked by fact-checkers.

    In the wake of Navalny’s death, however, the image has taken on a new life and has been shared widely on X, where it has been viewed well over a million times, and on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as on Russian social media platform Vkontakte. It has also been used on many Russian blogs and websites that amplify pro-Kremlin disinformation in multiple European languages.

    A non-fake image, showing Navalnaya standing alongside Chichvarkin on a beach, is also being shared to support the false claim that the pair are having an affair.

    Navalnaya, who has also said she was happy to be a politician’s wife rather than a politician, was thrust onto the world stage in the wake of her husband’s death, and within hours of his death being announced, she spoke at the highly influential Munich Security Conference. Last week, she spoke with EU leaders before jetting to San Francisco where she met with US president Joe Biden.

    Global recognition came with some issues. Her X account, which she created last week, was suspended when the platform’s automated systems triggered an alert after Navalnaya amassed 100,000 followers in the space of just three days. As she struggled to recover her account, others on the platforms were seeking to undermine her campaign to get justice for her husband by sharing a video that claimed Navalnaya was faking her grief over her husband’s death..

    The fake video was branded with the logo of the American Psychological Association (APA) and featured footage of US psychologist Paul Ekman, who wrote the bestselling book How to Tell if Someone Is Lying. The video, which looks like it was taken from the Instagram stories of the official APA account, attributes a statement to Ekman that Navalnaya’s grief for her husband’s death is simulated. However, no such video exists on the organization’s social media profiles or its website. A spokesperson for Ekman subsequently told an independent Russian news outlet that his work “does not include consultation on personal, legal, or political matters.”

    Also on X, accounts linked to the Matryoshka influence campaign, which targets journalists and fact-checking organizations and was exposed earlier this year by the Antibot4Navalny researchers. Accounts that have been linked to this group have been posting videos claiming that Navalnaya had an abortion last month.

    One account reviewed by WIRED that is part of this campaign responded to dozens of posts on X by news organizations in Europe and America by embedding the same fake video and making the same comment: “Yulia Navalnaya had an abortion in January 2024 at a private German clinic.” None of which is true.

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  • Leak Shows Alarm in Congress Over a Russian ‘Threat’ Is a Real Anomaly

    Leak Shows Alarm in Congress Over a Russian ‘Threat’ Is a Real Anomaly

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    Turner’s press release notably went further than HPSCI’s letter, pressing US president Joe Biden to personally “declassify all information” concerning the threat. The next day, Turner issued a second statement declaring he’d worked closely “with the Biden administration” before notifying Congress. Naft, the HPSCI spokesperson, clarified by email that Turner had worked with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on the language describing the threat contained in the Dear Colleague letter. (Naft stressed Turner had “NEVER” stated he’d cooperated with the White House.)

    Turner’s second statement added that HPSCI had voted 23–1 to make the disclosure. According to the committee’s own rules, a vote is not required to bring classified material to the attention of the chairmen and ranking members of other committees; only House-wide alerts require a vote. It is unclear which HPSCI member voted against the disclosure, as no official roll call was taken.

    A senior congressional source tells WIRED the Dear Colleague letter was always destined to cause panic. It is widely understood that the letters are not a secure form of communication and are often disclosed to reporters and others working off the Hill.

    Only four times in the past decade and a half, according to WIRED’s review of the system, has HPSCI used a Dear Colleague letter to draw attention to classified material—outside of routine budgetary concerns.

    The first such message is dated March 2009 and pertains to two classified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports. The subject of the reports is undeclared. A second letter was issued by HPSCI and signed by former congressperson Devin Nunes on January 10, 2017, informing members of a classified report on “Russian activities and intentions in the recent US election.”

    Neither letter is marked urgent.

    A third letter informing members about the option to review classified material is dated February 24, 2010; however, it makes clear the material was made available at the request of the intelligence community (IC). It is one of numerous letters in which HPSCI is seen lobbying on the spy agencies’ behalf—in this case, to support a renewal of the 9/11-era USA PATRIOT Act, today defunct due to a lack of support in Congress.

    A plurality of HPSCI’s Dear Colleague letters are aimed at whipping support for bills that reauthorize or advance US spy powers. Others urge lawmakers to vote against legislation that would enhance Americans’ privacy protections. One such letter reads simply: “Don’t Handcuff the FBI and Intelligence Community.”

    Six other letters are invitations to classified briefings held by intelligence agencies. HPSCI routinely acts as a mediator between the agencies and members of Congress, arranging briefings and other events on the intelligence community’s behalf.

    HPSCI sent an additional three Dear Colleagues letters the morning after its “urgent” warning about Russia went out: Each asked members to support various amendments to a FISA bill during an upcoming vote that HPSCI’s chair was, simultaneously, working to get called off.

    Sources told WIRED that Johnson’s decision to delay the vote on FISA came amid a sudden threat by Turner to kill the bill the moment it got to the floor. Turner was motivated to stop the bill’s progress at any cost, they said, due to the growing odds of a rival committee passing amendments of their own—to dramatically curtail the FBI’s domestic surveillance abilities.

    Updated 2/22/2024, 3:55 pm EST: Clarified the procedural requirements for bringing classified information to the attention of members of the House of Representatives.

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  • Anne Neuberger, a Top White House Cyber Official, Is Staying Surprisingly Optimistic

    Anne Neuberger, a Top White House Cyber Official, Is Staying Surprisingly Optimistic

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    Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser for cyber, tells WIRED about emerging cybersecurity threats—and what the US plans to do about them.

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  • When My Country Invaded Ukraine, I Faced a Choice: Give Me Propaganda or Give Me Death

    When My Country Invaded Ukraine, I Faced a Choice: Give Me Propaganda or Give Me Death

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    A month later, the world saw images of mass graves in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, dead limbs sticking out of the sand. Outside our building one morning, on an old brick wall that was previously empty, was a fresh message, the paint still wet: “Russians, go home.” My boyfriend went back to Russia so he could obtain a European visa, promising he would be back in a month, but he never returned.

    Image may contain Clothing Glove Adult Person Footwear Shoe People Accessories Bag Handbag and Hat

    ARTWORK: MICHELLE THOMPSON; GETTY IMAGES

    I spent the rest of the year on the move: Cyprus, Estonia, Norway, France, Austria, Hungary, Sweden. I went where I had friends. The independent Russian media that I’d always consumed went into exile too, setting up operations where they could. TV Rain began broadcasting out of Amsterdam. Meduza moved its Russian branch to Europe. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta, cofounded by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov, reopened in Latvia. Farida Rustamova, a former BBC Russia correspondent, fled and launched a Substack called Faridaily, where she began publishing information from Kremlin insiders. Journalists working for the independent news website Important Stories, which published names and photos of Russian soldiers involved in the murder of civilians in a Ukrainian village, went to Czechia. These, along with 247,000 other websites, were blocked at the behest of the Prosecutor General’s Office but remained accessible in Russia through VPNs.

    “During the first days of the war, everything was in a fog,” says Ilya Krasilshchik, the former publisher of Meduza, who went on to found Help Desk, which combines news media and a help hotline for those impacted by war. “We felt it our duty to inform people of what the Russian army was doing in Ukraine, to document the hell that despair and powerlessness leave in their wake. But we also wanted to empathize with all of the people caught up in this meat grinder.” Taisiya Bekbulatova, a former special correspondent for Meduza and the founder of the news outlet Holod, tells me, “In nature you find parasites that can force their host to act in the parasite’s own interest, and propaganda, I believe, works in much the same way. That’s why we felt it was our duty to provide people with more information.”

    I wanted to continue my work in journalism, but the publications that had fled Russia weren’t hiring. My application for a Latvian humanitarian visa as an independent journalist was rejected, and I didn’t have the means to pay the fees for US or UK talent visas.

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  • The Notorious Lockbit Ransomware Gang Has Been Disrupted by Law Enforcement

    The Notorious Lockbit Ransomware Gang Has Been Disrupted by Law Enforcement

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    For the last four years, the LockBit ransomware group has been on an unrelenting rampage, hacking into thousands of businesses, schools, medical facilities, and governments around the world—and making millions in the process. A children’s hospital, Boeing, the UK’s Royal Mail, and sandwich chain Subway have all been recent victims.

    But LockBit’s hacking campaign has come to a juddering halt. A sweeping law enforcement operation, led by police at the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and involving investigators from 10 forces around the world, has infiltrated the ransomware group and taken its systems offline.

    Graeme Biggar, the director general of the NCA, says the group has been “fundamentally disrupted.” The law enforcement operation, called “Operation Cronos,” has taken control of LockBit’s infrastructure and administration system, seized its dark web leak site, accessed its source code, seized around 11,000 domains and servers, and obtained details of the group’s members. “As of today, LockBit is effectively redundant,” Biggar said at a press conference in London, appearing with law enforcement officials from the FBI and Europol. “We have hacked the hackers,” he says.

    The action is one of the largest, and potentially most significant, ever taken against a cybercrime group. Biggar says the law enforcement officials consider LockBit, which is global in nature, to have been the “most prolific and harmful” ransomware group that has been active in recent years. It was responsible for 25 percent of attacks in the last year. “LockBit ransomware has caused losses of billions,” Biggar says of the overall costs of attacks and recovery.

    As well as the seizing of technical infrastructure, the law enforcement operations around LockBit also include arrests in Poland, Ukraine, and the United States and sanctions for two alleged members of the group who are based in Russia. The group has members spread around the world, the officials said.

    Nicole M. Argentieri, acting assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice, says LockBit has received more than $120 million in ransomware payments and the action announced against the group is just the start of the clampdowns.

    The law enforcement action against LockBit was first revealed when its ransomware website dropped offline on February 19 and was replaced by a holding page saying it had been seized by police. The LockBit group, which debuted as “ABCD” before changing its name, first appeared at the end of 2019. Since then LockBit has rapidly attacked businesses and grown its name recognition within the cybercrime ecosystem. “LockBit has been a thorn in the side of businesses and governments for years, with well over 3,000 publicly known victims and [has been] seemingly untouchable,” says Allan Liska, an analyst specializing in ransomware for cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Lockbit’s long roster of victims include various US government organizations, ports, and automotive companies.

    LockBit operates as a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation, with a core handful of members creating its malware, and running its website and infrastructure. This core group licenses its code to “affiliates” who launch attacks against companies, steal their data, and try to extort money from them. “LockBit is the last of the “open affiliate” ransomware-as-a-service offerings, meaning anyone willing to cough up the cash can join their program with little or no vetting,” Liska says. “They likely have had hundreds of affiliates over the course of their run.”

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  • The Danger Lurking Just Below Ukraine’s Surface

    The Danger Lurking Just Below Ukraine’s Surface

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    Oleksandr Kryvtsov had enough.

    The owner of an agricultural company in Hrakove, near Kharkiv, Kryvtsov found his land littered with land mines. That region of Ukraine, occupied by Russian forces for nearly eight months, had been pockmarked with explosive ordinances. The threat meant that farmers like Kryvtsov had to let their fields lay fallow. Even though Kryvstov’s fields were once part of Europe’s breadbasket, Ukraine’s mine clearance teams were overworked and under-resourced.

    So Kryvtsov came up with his own solution. He jimmyrigged a plow onto an old tractor, with massive steel rollers underneath. On the side, he painted the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag. Kryvtsov connected a remote-control steering system and, from afar, he drove his Mad Max-style tractor over his fields, detonating any mines lurking under the soil.

    The makeshift operation has worked well, Kryvtsov told Reuters, even clearing an anti-tank mine.

    Kryvstov’s story is an example of incredible Ukrainian ingenuity—a nation of gilders, working to invent, adapt, and repurpose technology to defend themselves against a better-resourced, larger, determined enemy. But it’s also an ominous sign of just how bad the problem is.

    In recent months, WIRED has investigated the technological challenges and opportunities facing Ukraine as it tries to defend itself and recapture its territory. One particular problem, unsung by the Western media but frequently cited by Ukrainian officials, are the haphazard minefields across Eastern Ukraine.

    WIRED has spoken to a range of engineers, government officials, and humanitarian mine-clearance experts, and consulted Ukraine’s new mine clearance plan. It is apparent that Kyiv is prioritizing the problem, but without a significant new influx of money, personnel, and technology, the threat of these mines could hobble Ukraine’s economy, frustrate future counteroffensives, and pose a humanitarian crisis for decades to come.

    A Humanitarian Crisis, an Economic Cost

    Ukraine’s mine problem has been acute for a decade. The full-scale war with Russia has only made it worse. From 2014, when Russia first invaded, to the end of 2021, the United Nations says 312 Ukraines were killed by land mines. Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Ukraine has recorded at least 269 civilian casualties, including 14 children. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has taken to calling Eastern Ukraine “the largest minefield in the world.”

    Those casualty figures only capture the deaths on territory currently held by Ukraine. Behind the front lines, in the Russian-occupied regions of Eastern Ukraine, at least a hundred more have reportedly been killed.

    “Twenty percent of the whole territory is dangerous,” Ihor Bezkaravainyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of finance, tells WIRED. “Right now we’re talking about 150,000 square kilometers.” (The total area, including water littered with naval mines, is nearly 175,000 km².)

    Bezkaravainyi is a veteran of the war in Eastern Ukraine—he lost a leg to an anti-tank mine in 2016. He’s now responsible for coordinating the mine-clearance effort behind the front lines, giving Ukrainians back their property and recovering damaged agricultural lands. It’s not an easy task.

    “It looks like the zone rogue in France after World War One,” Bezkaravainyi says, referring to the areas near Germany and Belgium that remain contaminated by land mines to this day.

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  • How to Not Get Scammed Out of $50,000

    How to Not Get Scammed Out of $50,000

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    Plus: State-backed hackers test out generative AI, the US takes down a major Russian military botnet, and 100 hospitals in Romania go offline amid a major ransomware attack.

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  • Russian Memes Celebrate ‘Tucker Carlson Day’ After Putin Interview

    Russian Memes Celebrate ‘Tucker Carlson Day’ After Putin Interview

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    “Across social media, Kremlin sources have moved quickly to take advantage of Tucker Carlson’s interview as an opportunity to amplify propaganda aimed at building support for Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine,” Ben Scott, director at Reset, a London-based nonprofit that tracks disinformation campaigns, tells WIRED.

    This blanket coverage was repeated across Russia’s state-run media. Newsroom homepages are filled with multiple stories about the interview, and many of them highlight how successful Putin has been at getting his message to a Western audience.

    In one of a dozen articles published by state-run news agency RIA Novosti, the author claimed the interview was “aimed at a Western audience that knows nothing about Russian history so that it realizes that Russians and Ukrainians are one people,” referencing Putin’s 30-minute introduction to Russian history that went back to 862.

    Even before the interview was published, Russian state-run TV channels had been tracking Carlson’s every move while in Moscow, including his trip to the Bolshoi ballet and the fact that he was charging his phone and using Wi-Fi.

    The interview was also broadly disseminated on Telegram, including on channels created or renamed especially for the occasion, according to research shared with WIRED by Reset. These channels quickly accumulated large followings: One newly-created Telegram channel called “Tucker Carlson in Russian” gained over 18,000 new subscribers interested in the interview. Another channel, renamed “Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Putin,” has over 200,000 subscribers. Some pro-Kremlin Telegram channels published dashboards alleging through-the-roof statistics about how the interview performed online, while others posted screenshots of charts claiming to show interest in the interview on Google over time.

    On Russia Today’s official Telegram channel, the news station celebrated how Western media reacted, writing: “Mainstream media’s Putin–Carlson meltdown reveals the Western narrative’s weak hand.” Other Telegram channels also posted clips of Western media reactions to the interview.

    “Much of the Russian audience believes [the interview] was conducted with the sole vision of educating the West,” Kyle Walter, director of research at Logically, a company that uses AI to track disinformation, tells WIRED. “Many channels are focusing on just how much attention the interview got, as well as the articulated lengthy history associated with Russia that ‘America does not have.’”

    In the aftermath of the interview, Vladislav Davankov, the vice speaker of the State Duma and presidential candidate from the New People political party, suggested that the Russian telecommunications agency Roskomnadzor should unblock X because the platform hosting the Putin interview had shown “it is neutral in disseminating information” and had “deleted more than 90 percent of the content prohibited in Russia” since Musk took control.

    Many Russian Telegram users also celebrated Elon Musk’s role in disseminating the interview: On his X profile, Musk pinned the interview and encouraged followers to watch.



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  • Russia Is Boosting Calls for ‘Civil War’ Over Texas Border Crisis

    Russia Is Boosting Calls for ‘Civil War’ Over Texas Border Crisis

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    “When I’m trying to identify disinformation operations in the wild I need to understand the initial signals and ideas that Russian state media and influencers are sharing,” Walter tells WIRED. “Russian Telegram channels just blew up overnight, and started really dialing into messaging specifically about the possibility that Texas could be an independent state, the possibility that there could be a US civil war.”

    Russian state-media echoed these claims, and published a flood of articles with headlines featuring phrases like “Civil war 2.0.” They also spread conspiracies claiming that “US elites will keep the border wide open.”

    Last week, the Russian Telegram channels and state media also began to boost the ‘Take Our Border Back’ convoy led by far right extremists, sovereign citizens, QAnon adherents, and anti-vaccine conspiracists who traveled from Virginia to the border in Texas in support of Abbott. “Fears of FBI Spying on ‘Take Our Border Back’ Convoy Show US Democracy Dying,” one Sputnik headline read last week.

    The convoy’s official channels on Telegram were also infiltrated by Russian accounts, though some were removed or called out by the US-based members of the group. “They are in every single group on any social media,” one member calling themselves ‘Eat Putin’s Heart’ wrote on Telegram in response to a question about why Russians were members of the group. “They want a civil war/ chaos more than anything. What’s bad for America is great for Russia.”

    Researchers at Antibot4Navalny, a Russian anti-disinformation research group that has been closely tracking a Russian disinformation network known as Doppelganger on X, shared data exclusively with WIRED that shows a network of bot accounts previously linked to the Doppelganger campaign have been deployed in the last week online to discuss the Texas issue.

    The campaign, like previous Doppelganger campaigns, shared links to fake websites which are designed to look legitimate but actually contain fake articles designed to undermine the US. One article, for example, appeared on a fake site called Warfare Insider and stated that Texas “has become a battleground symbolizing the clash between state and federal authorities.”

    In recent days, the bots have also been responding to posts unrelated to Texas by referencing the situation at the border.

    Some experts have been linking this campaign to previous Russian disinformation campaigns. Already, it echoes the incident when Russian operatives were accused of organizing an anti-immigrant rally, and a counter protest event to their own rally, in Texas ahead of the 2016 election.

    Caroline Orr, a behavioral scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who tracks disinformation online, wrote in her newsletter Weaponized that the term “Free Texas” in Russian was being “used extensively [on X], and nearly exclusively, by Russian accounts associated with the notorious Internet Research Agency, which housed the 2016 election interference operation.”

    The IRA was a Kremlin-linked troll farm launched in St. Petersburg that gained notoriety for its role in attempting to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election. It was run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who also ran the Wagner mercenary group until he died in a mysterious helicopter crash last year.

    There also appear to be a number of Russian accounts on X posing as pro-Texas groups, in another echo of 2016 when an account that claimed to be run by Tennessee Republicans was outed as Russian-run.

    One of the suspect accounts is the Texan Independence Supporters, which has already been called out for spelling errors and constantly referencing Ukraine and Russia. On Sunday, the account claimed “we are a Texan organization, not Russian. We can definitely assure ya’ll [sic] that we’re not Russian.”

    Before this, Russia had already been accused of dipping its toe in the 2024 US presidential election—including boosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign—but Walters says the effort to push the Texas crisis narrative marks an escalation in the Kremlin’s efforts.

    “This is the first thing that I see as a potentially significant concern to look out for, because I think it is an area [where] they could fairly easily cause more divide in the US,” he says.



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