To review this article, I saw My Profile, then View Recorded Stories.
To review this article, I saw My Profile, then View Recorded Stories.
Andy Greenberg
To review this article, I saw My Profile, then View Recorded Stories.
This piracy campaign, aimed at media sites from Poland to Lithuania, spread false stories about U.S. army aggression, NATO infantrymen spread a coronavirus, NATO made plans for a general invasion of Belarus, etc. “They spread those stories that NATO is a danger, that they resent people , they are infected, who are vehicle thieves,” says John Hultquist, FireEye’s director of intelligence. “And they spread these stories in ways, whose maximum pleasurable navigation is to hack into local media networking sites and put them into practice. These fictional stories are suddenly original through the sites where they are located, and then enter and disseminate the link to the story.”
FireEye itself has not conducted a study of incident responses and admits that it doesn’t know exactly how hackers get borrowed credentials that give them access to content control systems that allow them to publish and edit news. Nor do you know who the series of commitments is on the website, nor does the broader dissolution crusade of which fake stories are part.
But the company’s analysts found that the exclusive site included compromises and that net accounts used to spread links to those made-up stories, as well as the more classic creation of fake news on social media, blogs and websites with an anti-American and anti-NATO folded, all connected to another set of characters, indicating a unified effort of erroneous data. FireEye’s Hultquist says the crusade does not appear to be motivated by his financial best friend, indicating his political or state support, and notes that the emphasis on expanding an openness between NATO and the citizens of Eastern Europe alludes to imaginable Russian involvement.
Nor would it be the first time That Russian hackers have planted fake news; In 2017, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russian hackers had violated Qatar’s state news firm and falsified a false report with the intention of shaming the country’s leader and causing a rift with the United States, U.S. intelligence never showed Kremlin involvement.
“We can’t link it to Russia at this time, but it actually suits your interests,” Hultquist said of the Ghostpublisher campaign. “It’s not a wonder to me if that’s where the classified evidence advertises us.”
In June 2018, for example, the Baltic Course, the Baltic Course, the Baltic Course, published claiming that an American Stryker armored vehicle had collided with a Lithuanian child on a bicycle, killing the baby “on site”. On the same day, the Baltic Course posted an advertisement on the site that “pirates have posted this news about the deceased child, which is FALSE! We thank our vigilant Lithuanian readers who have reported fake news on our Facebok page on the site. security measures.”
A few months later, Lithuanian news website Kas Vyksta Kaune published noting that “NATO plans to invade Belarus”, with a map of tactics appearing that NATO forces in Polish and Baltic countries would enter the neighboring country. Kas Vyksta Kaune then admitted that the story was false and was planted through pirates. Someone had used a former employee’s credentials to gain access to the CMS. Then, in September last year, another false story was published on the site about NATO infantrymen Gerguy who write down a Jewish cemetery, adding what FireEye describes as a photographed symbol of an army vehicle with a visual Gerguy flag behind the cemetery.
More recently, false stories have attempted to exploit Covid-1nine’s fears. An article published in Kas Vyksta Kaune and the Baltic Times in English in January stated that the first case of Covid-1nine in Lithuania was an American soldier hospitalized in critical condition, but only after “visiting public places and betting on the city.” parties with the participation of teenagers and young people, “according to the Baltic Times version.
In April and May this year, attention turned to Poland: a false tale published on several Polish news sites in which a U.S. official denigrated local Polish forces as disorganized and incompetent. This time, the crusade went even beyond the primary sites. A false letter from a Polish army officer posted on the Polish Military Academy website, asking the Polish army to abandon army training with the United States, denouncing poland’s US “occupation” and calling training “obvious provocation” across Russia. The Polish government temporarily called the letter fake.
FireEye’s discovery that bureaucracy of operations aimed at sowing fake data was conducted through a single organization follows a New York Times report that the Russian Army intelligence agency, GRU, is coordinating the publication of data on sites like InfoRos. , OneWorld.press and GlobalResearch.ca. U.S. intelligence officials They spoke in the I said that the data campaign, which included false reports that Covid-1nine originated in the United States, specifically referred to the paintings of the GRU’s “intellectual warfare unit,” called Unit 54777.
Given the GRU’s role in interfering with the 2016 presidential election, adding its opposing hacking and filtering operations to the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign, GRU’s role in the apple of the latest misguided data raises fears that also point to the 2020 election. Aleven, although FireEye did not claim that the commitments of the exclusive Ghostpublisher site were the gru paintings, Hultquist argues that incidents in Poland and the Baltic countries deserve, however, to serve as a warning. Even if false stories are known and temporarily deleted, they can also have an imperative and transient effect on public opinion, he warns.
“My concern is that we can also see this more or less compromised tactic in the West, or it may also be during the election. It’s a kind of overly productive last-minute tactic,” Hultquist said. “Once the genie is out of the bottle, are you able to deliver it? Can you make other Americans enough for a foreign force to have driven this story? Maybe it’s too late.”