Facebook parent company Meta detailed Thursday an array of shady cyber tactics that it says groups linked to Russia and Belarus are using to target Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.
The tactics the groups are using include posing as journalists and independent news outlets online to push Russian talking points, attempting to hack dozens of Ukrainian soldiers’ Facebook accounts, and running coordinated campaigns to try to get posts by critics of Russia removed from social media, according to Meta.
A hacking group known as “Ghostwriter,” which cyber experts believe is linked to Belarus, attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel, the company said.
The hackers were successful in “a handful of cases,” Meta said, and “they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared.”
Meta also noted that actions by groups linked to the Russian and Belarusian government appeared to intensify shortly before the invasion, adding that it had observed that accounts linked to the Belarusian KGB “suddenly began posting in Polish and English about Ukrainian troops surrendering without a fight and the nation’s leaders fleeing the country on February 24, the day Russia began the war.”
Meta also said it had removed a network of about 200 accounts operated from Russia that repeatedly filed false reports about people in Ukraine and Russia in an attempt to get them and their posts removed from the platform. The accounts regularly falsely reported to Meta that people in Ukraine and Russia had broken the company’s rules on hate speech as well as other policies. This tactic, known as “mass-reporting,” is commonly used by people trying to have an opponent’s social media accounts shut down.
Russia’s invasion brought a “huge surge in attacks against social media accounts via mass reporting,” said Vadym Hudyma, co-founder at Digital Security Lab…
Source : cnn
