Cyberwar is also a war of disinformation. Facebook (Meta), which closely follows the development of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, said it had dismantled a network, run by people in Russia and Ukraine and targeting the latter. This network carried out phishing operations and created fake profiles on social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, but also on Russian networks like Odnoklassniki and VK.
“Over the past 48 hours, we discovered a relatively small network of around 40 accounts, pages and groups across Facebook and Instagram.write Meta’s cybersecurity specialists in a blog post. They were operated from Russia and Ukraine and targeted people in Ukraine on several social media platforms and through their own websites. We have terminated this operation, blocked their domains from being shared on our platform, and exchanged information with other tech platforms, researchers, and governments.”. Meta specifies that several thousand people visited one or more of these pages and a few hundred followed one or more of these Instagram accounts.
The network of cyber attackers used artificial intelligence techniques such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate fake profile photos. They also pretended to be based in Kiev and pretended to be high-ranking people: editors, former aeronautical engineers or the author of a scientific publication on hydrography. The operation aimed to direct Internet users to a handful of websites posing as independent news outlets, publishing allegations that the West was betraying Ukraine and that Ukraine was a failed state.
“Our investigation is ongoing and, so far, we have found links between this network and another operation which we took down in April 2020, which we then connected to individuals in Russia, in the Donbass region in Ukraine and two media organizations in Crimea – NewsFront and SouthFront – now sanctioned by the US government”further specifies the social network.
Separately, Meta said it has seen an increase in hacking attempts by Ukrainians in recent days, with ramifications to a network known in cybersecurity circles as the Belarus-linked “Ghostwriter”, which has previously been blamed for cyberattacks in other European countries. Facebook security experts recommend being especially vigilant when interacting unsolicited with Ukrainian accounts.