Disinformation | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of 32 internet domains used by a pro-Russian propaganda operation called Doppelganger as part of a sweeping set of actions. Accusing the Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaign of violating U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws, the agency called out companies Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technology (Structura), and ANO Dialog for working at the behest of the Russian Presidential Administration. The goal, it said , is to "covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election." Among the methods Doppelganger used to drive viewership to the cybersquatted media domains encompassed the deployment of "influencers" worldwide, paid social media ads, a

OpenAI on Friday said it banned a set of accounts linked to what it said was an Iranian covert influence operation that leveraged ChatGPT to generate content that, among other things, focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. "This week we identified and took down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating content for a covert Iranian influence operation identified as Storm-2035," OpenAI said . "The operation used ChatGPT to generate content focused on a number of topics — including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S. presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites." The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the content did not achieve any meaningful engagement, with a majority of the social media posts receiving negligible to no likes, shares, and comments. It further noted it had found little evidence that the long-form articles created using ChatGPT were shared on social media platforms.

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said it seized two internet domains and searched nearly 1,000 social media accounts that Russian threat actors allegedly used to covertly spread pro-Kremlin disinformation in the country and abroad on a large scale. "The social media bot farm used elements of AI to create fictitious social media profiles — often purporting to belong to individuals in the United States — which the operators then used to promote messages in support of Russian government objectives," the DoJ said . The bot network, comprising 968 accounts on X, is said to be part of an elaborate scheme hatched by an employee of Russian state-owned media outlet RT (formerly Russia Today), sponsored by the Kremlin, and aided by an officer of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), who created and led an unnamed private intelligence organization. The developmental efforts for the bot farm began in April 2022 when the individuals procured online infrastructure while anon

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a new influence operation targeting Ukraine that leverages spam emails to propagate war-related disinformation. The activity has been linked to Russia-aligned threat actors by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET, which also identified a spear-phishing campaign aimed at a Ukrainian defense company in October 2023 and a European Union agency in November 2023 with an aim to harvest Microsoft login credentials using fake landing pages. Operation Texonto, as the entire campaign has been codenamed, has not been attributed to a specific threat actor, although some elements of it, particularly the spear-phishing attacks, overlap with  COLDRIVER , which has a history of harvesting credentials via bogus sign-in pages. The disinformation operation took place over two waves in November and December 2023, with the email messages bearing PDF attachments and content related to heating interruptions, drug shortages, and food shortages. The November wave tar

The Russia-linked influence operation called Doppelganger has targeted Ukrainian, U.S., and German audiences through a combination of inauthentic news sites and social media accounts. These campaigns are designed to amplify content designed to undermine Ukraine as well as propagate anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, U.S. military competence, and Germany's economic and social issues, according to a new Recorded Future report shared with The Hacker News. Doppelganger ,  described  by Meta as the "largest and the most aggressively-persistent Russian-origin operation," is a  pro-Russian network  known for spreading anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Active since at least February 2022, it has been linked to two companies named Structura National Technologies and Social Design Agency. Activities associated with the influence operation are known to leverage manufactured websites as well as those impersonating authentic media – a technique called brandjacking – to disseminate adversarial narrat

Meta has disclosed that it disrupted two of the largest known covert influence operations in the world from China and Russia, blocking thousands of accounts and pages across its platform. "It targeted more than 50 apps, including Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Medium, Blogspot, LiveJournal, VKontakte, Vimeo, and dozens of smaller platforms and forums," Guy Rosen, chief information security officer at Meta, said last week, describing the Chinese disinformation group. The network, which included 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Pages, 15 Groups and 15 Instagram accounts, is said to have been run by "geographically dispersed operators" across China, posting content about China and its province Xinjiang, criticism of the U.S, Western foreign policies, and critics of the Chinese government. Central to the activity is the sharing of spammy links, the origins of which trace back to a cluster named Spamouflage (aka DRAGONBRIDGE ) that has been

Deep fakes are expected to become a more prominent attack vector. Here's how to identify them. What are Deep Fakes? A deep fake is the act of maliciously replacing real images and videos with fabricated ones to perform information manipulation. To create images, video and audio that are high quality enough to be used in deep fakes, AI and ML are required. Such use of AI, ML and image replacement are unlike other types of information manipulation, which use less extreme manipulation techniques, like misrepresentation of information, isolating parts of the information or editing it in a deceptive manner. Etay Maor, Senior Director of Security Strategy at Cato Networks adds "To add complications, the recent advancements and accessibility to AI generated text, such as GPT3, have already been used in combination with deepfakes (as a proof of concept) to create interactive, human looking conversation bots" What Do Deep Fakes Look Like? Deep fakes come in all shapes and siz