Facebook parent company Meta on Thursday detailed a series of shady cyber tactics that groups with links to Russia and Belarus are using to target Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.
Tactics used by the groups include posing as journalists and independent news outlets online to promote Russian talking points, trying to hack dozens of Ukrainian soldiers’ Facebook accounts, and running coordinated campaigns to try to block posts from Remove critics of Russia from social media. to meta.
A hacking group dubbed “Ghostwriters,” which cyber experts believe is linked to Belarus, has attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel, the company said.
The hackers were successful in “a handful of cases,” Meta said, and “they posted videos calling for the army to surrender, as if those posts were from the legitimate account holders.” We have blocked the sharing of these videos.”
Meta also noted that the actions of groups linked to the Russian and Belarusian governments seemed to intensify just before the invasion, adding that she observed that accounts linked to the Belarusian KGB “suddenly started doing it to post in Polish and English about the surrender of Ukrainian troops without a fight The nation’s leaders fled the country on February 24, the day Russia started the war.
Meta also said it removed a network of about 200 Russia-based accounts that had repeatedly submitted false reports about people in Ukraine and Russia in an attempt to remove them and their posts from the platform. The accounts regularly falsely told Meta that people in Ukraine and Russia had violated the company’s hate speech rules and other policies. Known as “bulk reporting,” this tactic is commonly used by people trying to have an opponent’s social media accounts shut down.
The invasion of Russia has brought a “huge surge in attacks on social media accounts through mass media coverage,” said Vadym Hudyma, co-founder of Digital Security Lab Ukraine, an organization that helps secure the online accounts of journalists and activists .
Many of the targeted Twitter and Facebook accounts were not verified, making it harder to recover the accounts of organizations that, for example, raised funds and coordinated medical supplies in response to the Russian invasion, Hudyma told CNN. “Many social media sites have been temporarily shut down. We probably recovered most of them fairly quickly. But that was a mess.”
Meta also said it continues to see the use of fake profile photos in disinformation campaigns.
In an earlier announcement in February, Meta said it discovered and shut down a covert Russian influence operation that was running accounts posing as people in Kyiv, including news editors, and targeting Ukrainians.
“They claimed to be based in Kyiv and posed as news editors, a former aeronautical engineer and the author of a scientific publication on hydrography – the science of mapping water,” Meta said in a blog post.
It linked the fake accounts to people previously sanctioned by the US government. The accounts and websites run by this influencer operation don’t appear to have been very successful in reaching many people, according to data verified by CNN.