https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-broke-into-real-news-sites-to-plant-fake-stories-anti-nato/
By Andy Greenberg
SECURITY
Wired.com
07.29.2020
OVER THE PAST few years, online disinformation has taken evolutionary
leaps forward, with the Internet Research Agency pumping out artificial
outrage on social media and hackers leaking documents—both real and
fabricated—to suit their narrative. More recently, Eastern Europe has
faced a broad campaign that takes fake news ops to yet another level:
hacking legitimate news sites to plant fake stories, then hurriedly
amplifying them on social media before they’re taken down.
On Wednesday, security firm FireEye released a report on a
disinformation-focused group it’s calling Ghostwriter. The propagandists
have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017,
with a focus on undermining NATO and the US troops in Poland and the
Baltics; they’ve posted fake content on everything from social media to
pro-Russian news websites. In some cases, FireEye says, Ghostwriter has
deployed a bolder tactic: hacking the content management systems of news
websites to post their own stories. They then disseminate their literal
fake news with spoofed emails, social media, and even op-eds the
propagandists write on other sites that accept user-generated content.
That hacking campaign, targeting media sites from Poland to Lithuania, has
spread false stories about US military aggression, NATO soldiers spreading
coronavirus, NATO planning a full-on invasion of Belarus, and more.
“They’re spreading these stories that NATO is a danger, that they resent
the locals, that they’re infected, that they’re car thieves,” says John
Hultquist, director of intelligence at FireEye. “And they’re pushing these
stories out with a variety of means, the most interesting of which is
hacking local media websites and planting them. These fictional stories
are suddenly bona fide by the sites that they’re on, and then they go in
and spread the link to the story.”
[...]
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