March 28, 2024

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The United Nations General Assembly decided to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council during the General Assembly on Thursday

The United Nations General Assembly decided to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council during the General Assembly on Thursday

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on Thursday described a suite of shady cyber tactics it says groups linked to Russia and Belarus are using to target Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

Tactics used by the groups include appearing as independent online journalists and news outlets to push Russian talking points, trying to hack dozens of Ukrainian soldiers’ Facebook accounts, and running coordinated campaigns to try to remove posts by Russia critics from social media, according to Meta.

The company said that a hacking group known as “Ghostwriter” believed by Internet experts to be linked to Belarus, attempted to hack the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel.

Meta said hackers succeeded in “a small number of cases,” and “posted videos calling on the military to surrender as if these posts were from legitimate account holders. We have blocked these videos from being shared.”

Meta also noted that the actions of groups linked to the Russian and Belarusian government appeared to have intensified shortly before the invasion, adding that she noted that accounts linked to the Belarusian KGB “suddenly started publishing in Polish and English about Ukrainian forces surrendering without a fight and the nation’s leaders fleeing the country in February 24, the day Russia started the war.

Meta also said it had removed a network of about 200 accounts operating from Russia that had repeatedly made false reports about people in Ukraine and Russia in an effort to remove them and their posts from the platform. The accounts incorrectly reported to Meta that people in Ukraine and Russia had violated the company’s rules on hate speech as well as other policies. This tactic, known as “mass coverage,” is commonly used by people trying to shut down opponents’ social media accounts.

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Vadim Hedema, co-founder of Digital Security Lab Ukraine, an organization that helps secure online accounts of journalists and activists, said the Russian invasion led to a “massive increase in attacks against social media accounts via mass reporting”.

Many of the targeted Twitter and Facebook accounts were not verified, which made it difficult to recover the accounts of organizations that were, for example, raising funds and coordinating medical supplies in response to the Russian invasion, Hidema told CNN. “Many social media pages have been temporarily closed. We may have recovered most of them very quickly. But this was a mess.”

Meta also said she continues to see fake profile pictures used in disinformation campaigns.

In an earlier announcement in February, Meta said it had discovered and shut down a secret Russian influence operation running accounts posing as people in Kyiv, including news editors, targeting Ukrainians.

“They claimed to be based in Kyiv and pretended to be news editors, former aeronautical engineer, and author of a science publication on hydrography – the science of water cartography,” Mita said in a blog post.

The fake accounts have been linked to people sanctioned by the US government in the past. The accounts and websites run by this influence operation don’t appear to have been very successful in reaching many people, according to data reviewed by CNN.