With its athletes barred from participating in the Summer Olympics under the country’s flag, Russia has focused its anger on the games and this year’s host Paris.
According to a report published by Microsoft on Sunday, Russian propagandists created an hour-long documentary, falsified news reports and even imitated French and American intelligence agencies to issue fake warnings urging people to avoid the games.
The report details a disinformation campaign by a group the company calls Storm-1679. The campaign appears to have accelerated since March, flooding social media with short videos warning of possible terrorist attacks and stoking security fears.
While the operation targets the Games, it uses various techniques to spread disinformation that could also be used in European and US elections.
American and French officials have been tracking the campaign. An American official said Russian disinformation spread by the Kremlin on social media continued to pose a threat to the security of the United States and its allies.
The group has also tried to get fact-checkers to investigate their claims, hoping to use the attention to spread the disinformation to new audiences once it becomes known.
For months, French officials have focused on the ways in which Russia could try to undermine the games. Hackers linked to Russian intelligence disrupted the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, and French officials are preparing for more cyberattacks this year.
France has raised its terror alert level following an Islamic State attack in Moscow in March and threats against high-profile soccer matches in Paris. France has also increased security for the Olympic Games. Neither French nor American officials are warning people to stay away from the games, but the Russian disinformation campaign is designed to trick people into doing just that.
Microsoft researchers and U.S. government officials have identified a number of Kremlin-linked groups spreading disinformation against Europe and the United States.
Some are led by associates of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. Others are linked to Russian intelligence. Some hide behind fake nonprofit groups. Others are veterans of the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St. Petersburg that spread election propaganda in 2016. The agency was led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of a mercenary group that led an uprising against the Kremlin and was then killed in a plane crash last year.
According to Microsoft, Storm-1679 appears to be separate from these efforts. The group’s disinformation is consistent with Kremlin propaganda, but few details are known about it.
Bellingcat, a research group that uses publicly available data to conduct open source investigations, was targeted by disinformation videos and has been monitoring the campaign as it progresses. Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, says his group has not determined whether Storm-1679 is backed by the Russian government or is independent.
“It could be Prigozhin 2.0 working for the Kremlin, or an overly imaginative pro-Russian blogger doing this for fun; We just don’t know at this point,” Mr Higgins said.
The work began in earnest last summer with the release of a fake documentary about the International Olympic Committee that appropriated the Netflix logo and used an AI-powered voice that imitated Tom Cruise. The committee managed to get the video – a parody of the 2013 film “Olympus Has Fallen” – removed from YouTube. But the attacks continued, with continued attempts to discredit his leadership, the committee said in March, citing a campaign that used fake recordings of alleged phone conversations by African Union officials on behalf of Russia.
The group known as Storm-1679 now appears to be creating shorter videos that are easier to create. There was once a focus on denigrating Ukrainian refugees in the West, but after French President Emmanuel Macron began publicly considering sending French troops to Ukraine, the focus shifted to the Olympics.
Microsoft estimates that Storm-1679 produces three to eight fake videos a week in English and French, with many impersonating the BBC, Al Jazeera and other broadcasters. The group appears to respond quickly to news events such as protests in New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. Others focus on the prospect of a terrorist attack in Paris.
Most of the videos claiming to be from the CIA and French intelligence are relatively simple. They’re unlike anything the CIA has actually produced, but to unsuspecting readers online they might appear legitimate with the agency’s logo and stark white-on-black typography.
“They’re trying to cultivate an anticipation of violence,” Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Digital Threat Analysis Center, said of the group behind the fake posts. “They want people to be afraid to go to the Olympics.”
A CIA spokesman said a video that circulated online in February purporting to be a warning from the agency about terrorist attacks during the Games was fake.
In February, Viginum, the government agency in France that combats online disinformation, identified the fake CIA video as part of a campaign called “Matryoshka,” after the nesting dolls popular in Russia.
The campaign was also responsible for fake videos about France’s domestic intelligence service, the French government. A person briefed on the French investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments, said Viginum and the French Foreign Ministry quickly recognized the group’s Russian disinformation aimed at undermining the Olympics.
French officials and Microsoft say one of the group’s tactics appears to be to attract the attention of fact-checking organizations.
“When Storm-1679 posts content on Telegram, it typically circulates there for a day or two and then disappears,” Mr Watts said. “Typically, content doesn’t travel from one platform to another, but when their false content is fact-checked by accounts with large followings, the content receives many more views and is exposed to new and different audiences.”
Mr Higgins said if hate speech against fact-checkers was part of the group’s strategy, it did not appear to be effective. Bellingcat, he said, is aware that reporting on disinformation can draw attention to propaganda, and this is taken into account when fact-checking its videos of videos.
“It doesn’t appear that their messages are being amplified,” Mr. Higgins said. “Even in the usual circles that spread disinformation about Russia, we don’t see it being shared at all.”
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2024-06-03 18:20:54
www.nytimes.com
