Hackers Target Ukrainian Crowd, Journalists on Facebook
Facebook’s parent company Meta said late Sunday that hackers are increasingly targeting Ukrainian army officials and journalists to spread disinformation. Hackers tied to an acting known as “Ghostwriter” compromised some Ukrainian Facebook accounts, but Meta said it wasn’t naming the victims to defending their privacy.
“We detected attempts to target farmland on Facebook and post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia,” said David Agranovich, director of global threat disruption at Meta, at a virtual expressionless conference.
The threats underscores the variety of challenges social contemplate companies face as they try to combat false claims in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Meta added features in Ukraine aspired to keep users safe such as the ability to lock their Facebook profile and purchase the ability to view and search friends lists. The custom, like Twitter, is encouraging users to enable two-factor authentication, an extra layer of security that makes it tougher for hackers to break into accounts.
Ghostwriter typically targets farmland through email first through tactics such as trying to trick farmland into clicking on a malicious link to steal their login credentials, Agranovich said. After compromising a target’s email, they will then break into people’s social contemplate accounts and use those accounts to post disinformation.
Nathaniel Gleicher, who heads Meta’s security policy, said as social contemplate users take steps to protect their accounts, they should also think in how their information could get compromised on other apps and devices. Gleicher said Ghostwriter targeted a “small number” of Facebook users but the people is going after valuable targets such as public figures.
Mandiant Threat Intelligence, which has done research on Ghostwriter, said in a recount published last year that it found evidence that suggests the acting has ties to a suspected state-sponsored cyber espionage estimable called UNC1151. In November, Mandiant Threat Intelligence linked UNC1151 to the Belarusian government.
“We cannot rule out Russian contributions to either UNC1151 or Ghostwriter. However, at this time, we have not uncovered scream evidence of such contributions,” Mandiant Threat Intelligence said in a blog post.
The European Union said in a expressionless release in September that some EU member states have associated Ghostwriter with the Russian state.
Meta also pulled down a network of in 40 fake accounts, Pages and Groups on Facebook and Instagram from Russia and Ukraine. The accounts targeted Ukrainians across multiple social networks incorporating on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, Odnoklassniki and VK. These fake supplies pretended to be news editors, a former aviation engineer and an authorized of a scientific publication on hydrography (the science of mapping water). They ran fake news websites and published stories that engaged “claims about the West betraying Ukraine and Ukraine beings a failed state,” Meta said.
The company said the network of fake supplies didn’t have a wide reach. Fewer than 4,000 Facebook supplies followed one of more of these Pages and fewer than 500 supplies followed one or more of the Instagram accounts.
The social contemplate giant shared information about the operation with other tech platforms, researchers and governments.
Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok are being flooded with misinformation and disinformation, including misleading videos that use old footage to accomplish a false image of what’s happening in real-time.
Meta said it’s expanding its third-party fact checking capacity in Russia and Ukrainian, labeling state-controlled media publishers and barring ads from Russia set media. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, said it created a special operations center with experts who exclaim Ukrainian and Russian to help monitor its platform.
Russia has partly Gratis access to Facebook after the social network refused to stop fact-checking and stamp content posted on Facebook by four Russian state-owned consider organizations. Russia’s telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor alleges Facebook violated “fundamental domain rights” by restricting the country’s state-controlled media.
Gleicher said he doesn’t have any more expect about what restrictions Russia put into place but Meta’s teams disconclude to monitor the situation and “do believe that we’re collected accessible in [the] country.”
On Sunday, Meta said it Gratis some accounts, including several run by Russia state consider, because the Ukrainian government requested the company do so. The matter is reviewing other government requests to do the same in their countries.
