It is a network of 193 particularly poorly performing websites. Viginum, the government service specializing in the detection of foreign digital interference operations, published a report yesterday detailing the organization of a galaxy of websites in the colors of news media and used to relay content presenting positively the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
The network consists of a total of at least 193 sites. While some were implemented from 2013 and mainly target Russian-speaking citizens, the most recent seek to reach a very French audience.
Viginum explains that it has named this operation “Portal Kombat”, “in reference to the offensive information strategy put in place from February 2022 by the actors who administer these digital portals.”
A family resemblance
Several websites in this galaxy were organized around variations of “pravda” domain names:
- The pravda-de site thus targets Germany, Austria and Switzerland
- Pravda-es broadcasts content aimed at Spanish-speaking audiences
- Pravda-fr broadcasts content in French.
The agency notes that the five sites, registered on the same date in June 2023, have similar characteristics: same IP address located on a server located in Russia, same architecture and graphic charter and same editorial line.
These different sites do not create new content strictly speaking but mainly content themselves with rebroadcasting texts, images and videos from several third-party sources.
According to Viginum, most of the content is taken from social media accounts (mainly Telegram) of Russian or pro-Russian actors, articles produced by Russian agencies and official sites or local actors.
This “pravda ecosystem”, as Viginum calls it, also has technical similarities with another galaxy of sites previously detected by Viginum in previous investigations.
Called “ecosysteme-news.ru” by the agency, these sites were created at the start of the Russian offensive and present themselves as local Ukrainian news sites. Viginum’s investigations showed that these sites shared the same hosting infrastructure.
In June 2023, Viginum had already denounced a similar disinformation campaign called Doppelganger or RRN. This network also relayed pro-Russian content aimed at misinforming readers on subjects linked to the war in Ukraine, using both fabricated media, counterfeit pages in the colors of French media like Le Monde, accounts and Facebook pages or Telegram channels.
Limited effect
France therefore publicly denounces this new galaxy of websites as an attempt to influence online debates on the subject of the war in Ukraine.
But the audience of these different sites remains relatively confidential: Viginum estimates that “According to the Similarweb tool, the average traffic on these five portals during the month of November 2023 was around 31,000 visits; the one targeting France being moreover, the least visited.”
The Viginum report also highlights the errors of site administrators in automating the translation of published content; certain sites intended for a French-speaking audience, for example, displayed articles entirely written in Cyrillic alongside other articles translated into French.
Viginum notes, however, that network administrators are implementing search engine optimization strategies to appear at the top of Google results, but with limited effect for the moment.