Five foreign digital interferences were detected by Viginum during the presidential and legislative elections of spring 2002, this new agency launched in July 2021 in charge of fighting disinformation has just unveiled. Viginum, directed by Gabriel Ferriol, did not really give details on the countries at the origin of these interferences or their technical methods in this first annual report.
The example of voting machines
A French security source had highlighted this summer the activism of the paramilitary company Wagner, reputed to be close to the Kremlin, in informational attacks in connection with French action in the Sahel, and a campaign from the American far right about so-called use of voting machines likely to lead to fraud. This rumor of the false use of compromised voting machines is the only concrete example of digital interference detailed in the report.
This content had been spotted at the beginning of March 2022 by Viginum on several social networks. “Before this informational maneuver gained momentum, the services of the Ministry of the Interior as well as several media very quickly denied this false information”, recalls Lieutenant-Colonel Marc-Antoine Brillant, in charge of securing the presidential election in Viginum.
84 phenomena detected
In total, Viginum, an agency attached like Anssi, the French cyber-firefighter, to the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security (SGDSN), a service of the Prime Minister, reports 84 inauthentic phenomena detected in one year. of work. Sixty are in connection with the spring elections, the biggest file in 2022 for the new service. Twelve of them were the subject of in-depth investigations.
In addition to the presidential and legislative elections, Viginum mobilized on the referendum in New Caledonia, or by monitoring what was said about the trial of the November 2015 attacks. Internationally, the service scrutinized fake news around the German federal election of September 2021, the contestation of the French presence in the Sahel or the war between Ukraine and Russia. Enigmatically, Viginum finally refers to an analysis of the “informational threat emanating from a foreign non-state actor” from May 2022.
42 agents
“Our role is not to tell what the truth is, but to bring to light potentially inauthentic phenomena taking place on online platforms and likely to reveal foreign digital interference”, reminded the Senate at the beginning of the month of October Stéphane Bouillon, head of the SGDSN. Concretely, Viginum agents track on social networks “atypical accounts, content likely to be inaccurate or misleading”, or even “aberrant, abnormal or coordinated behavior”, relying on analysis tools of data.
The Storyzy and Sahar platforms had thus been mentioned as the agency’s first suppliers, the agents also working from open source investigation methods. With 42 staff, Viginum hopes to eventually bring together 65 agents.