https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/lies-russia-tells-itself
"In early September, the infamous Russian disinformation project known as
Doppelganger hit the news again. Doppelganger—a scheme to disseminate fake
articles, videos, and polls about polarizing political and cultural issues in
the United States, as well as in France, Germany, and Ukraine—was first exposed
in 2022 and widely covered in the Western press. The project cloned entire news
organizations’ websites—complete with logos and the bylines of actual
journalists—and planted its own fake stories, memes, and cartoons, luring
casual Internet users to the sites via social media posts, often automated
ones.
Tech companies and research labs had carefully traced, documented, and often
removed some of Doppelganger’s online footprints, and even exposed the private
Moscow firm mostly responsible for the campaigns: the Social Design Agency. But
the disinformation campaigns persisted, and on September 4, in a move to
counter them, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had seized 32
Internet domains behind the Doppelganger campaign—and published an
unprecedented 277-page FBI affidavit that included 190 pages of internal SDA
documents likely sourced by American spies. Then, 12 days later, the German
daily
Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that, in late August, it had received from
an anonymous source, large amounts of authentic internal SDA documents. A day
before the FBI released its affidavit and the accompanying files—some of which
overlapped with the leaked ones—
Süddeutsche Zeitung asked me to comment on
the leak for its investigation, because I have researched and written about
disinformation and political warfare for almost ten years. I inquired whether
its source might allow me to have the entire 2.4 gigabytes of leaked SDA
documents, and the source agreed.
Until these recent disclosures—comprising more than 3,000 individual
files—observers could mostly just speculate about the goals, specific methods
and tradecraft, and bureaucratic procedures driving contemporary Russian
disinformation campaigns. The FBI affidavit and the European media leak offered
something unprecedented: a glimpse into the planning of one of the most
notorious disinformation efforts in the post–Cold War era. Disinformation
operators taking advantage of the Internet to disseminate propaganda to
gullible users had been a major concern since at least 2015, when the efforts
of a St. Petersburg troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency to
inflame latent conflicts was exposed in the press, and Russian military
intelligence deployed creative disinformation operations to interfere in the
2016 U.S. presidential race."
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: October 1, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-1-113126437
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
