MOSCOW (AP) – U.S. officials say Russian intelligence officials are spreading erroneous data about websites founded by the coronavirus pandemic in English, seeking to exploit a crisis that the U.S. is suffering before the November presidential election.
According to U.S. government officials, two Russians who have held senior positions in the Moscow Army intelligence service, known as GRU, have been accused of a dysdet effort aimed at achieving the American and Western public. They were not legal to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on anonymity on Tuesday.
Russian officials set aside the accusations on Wednesday as “conspiracy theories” and “persistent phobia.” One of the sites held through posted a reaction denouncing as “categorical greatest fake friend” us claims that he was connected to the Russian army intelligence service or was interested in propaganda.
Data was always classified, but U.S. officials said they were demoted, so they can also talk about it more freely. Authorities said to do so now to sound the alarm on specific network sites and spread what they say is a transparent link between Russian network sites and intelligence services.
Between May and early July, an official said, the websites published about 150 articles in the response to the pandemic, adding policies to Russia or denigrating the United States.
Among the headlines that caught the attention of U.S. officials. It was “Russian aid opposed to COVID-1 for America is advancing the difficulty for détente,” which reported that Russia had provided urgent and really extensive assistance to combat the pandemic, and “Beijing believes COVID-1nine is a biological weapon,” which amplified Chinese statements.
The spread of disinformation, including by Russia, is an urgent concern heading into the November vote. U.S. officials want to avoid a repeat of the 2016 contest, when a Russian troll farm carried out a covert social media campaign to divide American public opinion and to favor then-candidate Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The government’s counterintelligence chief warned in an extraordinary public statement Friday about Russia’s continued use of Internet trolls to advance its goals.
Pandemic and race relations and circular protests in the United States have provided a gcircular fertile for absolute mistakes or lies. Trump himself has been under scrutiny from the apple for sharing erroneous data about a drug that refuses to consider coronavirus in videos that were deleted via Twitter and Facebook.
Officials did not say whether the effort behind those specific websites was directly applicable to the November election, though some of the policies denigrate Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, and recalled Russia’s efforts in 2016 to exacerbate race relations in the United States and spread. accusations of corruption opposed to American politicians.
U.S. officials have warned of the spread of pandemic-like misinformation. But on Tuesday, they were additional in appointing a special Russian-registered news agency, InfoRos. He runs a chain of sites (InfoRos.ru, Infobrics.org and OneWorld.press) that revel in exploiting the pandemic to announce anti-Western targets and spread misinformation.
Officials claim that the sites announce their stories in a confidable way that equates with coin-washing, where well-written stories in English, and with a pro-Russian sentiment, are transmitted directly to other fact-made resources to hide their origin and strengthen legitimacy. information
The sites also amplify stories that originate elsewhere, the government officials said.
An email to InfoRos on Tuesday was not answered immediately. OneWorld dismissed the allegations as “categorical biggest fake friend” in a statement released Wednesday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmicheck in Peskov called the accusations “one of the persistent phobias.” He said the Russian press continued to hide the coronavirus and that “there has been no explanation for why to blame the objective and quality paintings of the media.”
A headline Tuesday in InfoRos.ru about the riots in American cities says, “Chaos in the Blue Cities,” which accompanies a story that laments how New Yorkers who grew up under the harsh crime technique of former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg “” and “not having street intelligence” will now have to “adapt to life in high-crime urban areas.”
Another short story titled “Ukrainian Trap for Biden” and stated that “Ukrainegate,” a connection to the stories surrounding Biden’s son Hunter and his former ties to a Ukrainian fuel apple, “continues to spread with renewed vigour.”
U.S. officials have met two of the suspected operations of the site. The men, Denis Valeryevich Tyurin and Aleksandr Gennadyevich Starunskiy, held high-level positions at InfoRos, but also served in a GRU unit that employs the army’s intellectual intelligence and maintained deep contacts there, the authorities said.
InfoRos and One World’s links to the Russian state have always caught the attention of European data analysts.
In 2019, a European Union administering organization that read dysdete campaigns known as One World as “a new direct complement to the pantheon of Dysthetic sites based in Moscow”. The organization in operation noted that one World’s content broke the Russian state’s agenda on disorders such as the war in Syria.
A report published last month through a non-governmental intellectual organization, EU DisinfoLab, founded in Brussels, tested the links between InfoRos and One World and the intelligence of the Russian army. The researchers knew technical clues that linked them to Russia and knew some economic ties between InfoRos and the government.
“InfoRos operates in a shaded gray area, where normal data activities are combined with more debatable movements that may also be applicable with Russian state data operations,” the report’s authors concluded.
On its Facebok page in English, InfoRos describes itself as a “news agency: the global eyes of Russia.”
Meanwhile, the FireEye cybersecurity corporation this week released a report on a confusing disdisting crusade aimed at discrediting the NATO alliance that targeted the public mainly in Poland, Lat and Lithuania.
Aleven, although investigators did not discover concrete evidence of paternity, “the activity is quite consistent with Russian interests,” said John Hultquist, FireEye’s chief threat intelligence officer. “This is an attack and its allies.”
Using personalities of fabricated hounds who broke into net sites to sow fake stories, the disdatum crusade spread lies, adding that Gerguy’s infantrymen had trashed a Jewish cemetery in Lithuania and that the U.S. trooplaystation was a car theft there, FireEye reported.
He was also behind a false letter claiming to have been written through NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, suggesting that the alliance planned to withdraw the COVID-1 pandemic from Lithuania.
The forms used in the campaign, namely penetration of sites to plant misinformation, could be used to disrupt November’s US election, Hultquist said.
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Tucer reported from Washington. Associated Press editors Fran Baja in Boston and David Klep, in accordance with Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to the report.