Putin’s government wages psychological warfare against Ukraine's allies, exploiting crises, from bank failures to chemical disasters, to sow panic and amplify popular discontent.
It also resembles the 2013 hack of the AP News Service Twitter feed in 2013, which claimed that a bombing of the White House had injured US president Barack Obama and caused US stock markets to plunge briefly. The hack was attributed to the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/computer-hacking-conspiracy-charges-unsealed-against-members-syrian-electronic-army). Resemblances between the SEA's targeting and tactics and that of Russian pseudo-hacktivist groups suggests cooperation between them.
Today's false report received amplification from Russian entities; as the Insider article points out, “The photo was spread by dozens of accounts on social media, including RT, a Russian state-media Twitter account with more than 3 million followers — but the post has since been deleted. Most other accounts that retweeted the image appear to be affiliated with conspiracies or the war in Ukraine." Also of interest, one of the that accounts pushing the story also generated a false post last month claiming a White House bombing, https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1660687047932166155
Some users commented that this could be a test run for other such panic attacks.
John Scott-Railton, a social media analyst at CitizenLab, tweeted, "Exercise: ask yourself how disinformation like this plays out in the context of a real high stakes moment. Like, say, a report of an attack on the president with realistic pictures / video /audio...a few hours before polls close on Election Day 2024. We are unprepared."
The claimed incident mirrored incidents that were happening in Russia at the time, including reported explosions of government buildings in the Russian city of Belgorod.
People involved in the hoax could have capitalized on the brief stock market plunge and rebound to profit from stock manipulations.
More on the "Pentagon explosion" fake image. This article tracks the picture to a person named Nova Sayadian in Los Angeles who retouches photos for a living--i.e. the picture could be a "cheapfake" not a "deepfake," https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/09/viral-hoax-pentagon-twitter/ but nevertheless something like this can move markets.
Another incident: On May 22, a Verified Blue Check Twitter account calling itself Bloomberg Feed claimed that an explosion occurred at the US Pentagon that morning https://www.insider.com/ai-generated-hoax-explosion-pentagon-viral-markets-dipped-2023-5 .The image appeared to be AI-generated or otherwise manipulated. On this false news, the S&P Stock Index briefly lost $500 billion (https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1660679743266607105. This scenario resembles the bank-run scenarios anticipated in the report “Stymied in Ukraine, Putin’s Government Resorts to Covert Sabotage and Panic-Mongering in the West” (https://nattothoughts.substack.com/p/stymied-in-ukraine-putins-government)
It also resembles the 2013 hack of the AP News Service Twitter feed in 2013, which claimed that a bombing of the White House had injured US president Barack Obama and caused US stock markets to plunge briefly. The hack was attributed to the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/computer-hacking-conspiracy-charges-unsealed-against-members-syrian-electronic-army). Resemblances between the SEA's targeting and tactics and that of Russian pseudo-hacktivist groups suggests cooperation between them.
Today's false report received amplification from Russian entities; as the Insider article points out, “The photo was spread by dozens of accounts on social media, including RT, a Russian state-media Twitter account with more than 3 million followers — but the post has since been deleted. Most other accounts that retweeted the image appear to be affiliated with conspiracies or the war in Ukraine." Also of interest, one of the that accounts pushing the story also generated a false post last month claiming a White House bombing, https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1660687047932166155
Some users commented that this could be a test run for other such panic attacks.
John Scott-Railton, a social media analyst at CitizenLab, tweeted, "Exercise: ask yourself how disinformation like this plays out in the context of a real high stakes moment. Like, say, a report of an attack on the president with realistic pictures / video /audio...a few hours before polls close on Election Day 2024. We are unprepared."
(https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1660718041565372460)
The claimed incident mirrored incidents that were happening in Russia at the time, including reported explosions of government buildings in the Russian city of Belgorod.
People involved in the hoax could have capitalized on the brief stock market plunge and rebound to profit from stock manipulations.
More on the "Pentagon explosion" fake image. This article tracks the picture to a person named Nova Sayadian in Los Angeles who retouches photos for a living--i.e. the picture could be a "cheapfake" not a "deepfake," https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/09/viral-hoax-pentagon-twitter/ but nevertheless something like this can move markets.
In a recent example of a Russian influence operation exploiting a natural disaster, the wildfires in Hawaii, “Russian state media amplified a coordinated campaign” (https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/watch-breaking-down-russias-disinformation) that had apparently been “initially seeded with inauthentic activity” and that exploited the Hawaiian tragedy to “promote divisiveness and make people think that the U.S. was neglecting Hawaii while sending continuing aid to Ukraine" (https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/russia-amplifies-right-wing-influence), according to disinformation researcher Caroline Orr Bueno. See https://nattothoughts.substack.com/p/russian-bentley-and-ferrari-hackers