Facebook parent company Meta on Thursday detailed a series of shady cyber tactics that groups associated with Russia and Belarus are using to attack Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.
The tactics the groups are using include impersonating journalists and independent news outlets online to spread Russian talking points, attempting to hack into dozens of Ukrainian soldiers’ Facebook accounts, and conducting coordinated campaigns to try and target posts by critics of Russia of Russia. remove social media. according to Meta.
A hacking group known as “Ghostwriter,” which cyber experts believe may be 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 military to surrender as if these messages came from the legitimate account owners. We’ve prevented these videos from being shared.”
Meta also noted that actions by groups associated with the Russian and Belarusian governments appeared to be intensifying shortly before the invasion, adding that it had noted that accounts associated with the Belarusian KGB “suddenly appear in Polish and Engels started posting about Ukrainian troops surrendering without a fight and the country’s leaders fled the country on February 24, the day Russia started the war.”
Meta also said it had removed a network of about 200 accounts operated from Russia that had repeatedly made false reports about people in Ukraine and Russia in an attempt to remove them and their posts from the platform. The accounts regularly falsely reported to Meta that people in Ukraine and Russia had violated the company’s hate speech rules and other policies. Known as “mass reporting,” this tactic is often used by people trying to shut down an opponent’s social media accounts.
The invasion of Russia fueled a “massive increase in mass media attacks on social media accounts,” said Vadym Hudyma, co-founder of Digital Security Lab Ukraine, an organization that helps secure the online accounts of journalists and activists.
Many of the targeted Twitter and Facebook accounts were unverified, making it more difficult to recover the accounts of organizations that, for example, collected money and coordinated medical supplies in response to the Russian invasion, Hudyma told DailyExpertNews. “A lot of social media pages were temporarily closed. We probably recovered most of them pretty quickly. But that was a mess.”
Meta also said it continues to see the use of fake profile photos in disinformation campaigns.
In an earlier announcement in February, Meta said it had discovered and shut down a secret Russian influence operation that controlled accounts masquerading as people in Kiev, including news editors, and targeting Ukrainians.
“They claimed to be based in Kiev and pretended to be news editors, a former aeronautical engineer and an author of a scientific publication on hydrography – the science of mapping water,” Meta said in a blog post.
It linked the fake accounts to people previously sanctioned by the US government. The accounts and websites operated by this influence operation do not appear to be very successful in reaching many people, according to data reviewed by DailyExpertNews.