Social Media Giant Targets Thousands of Accounts in Crackdown on Disinformation Campaigns Linked to China and Russia
Meta recently announced that it successfully disrupted two of the world's largest covert influence operations that originated from China and Russia. As a result, numerous accounts and pages were blocked across its platform. Guy Rosen, Meta's Chief Information Security Officer, reported that these operations targeted more than 50 applications, including popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Medium, Blogspot, LiveJournal, VKontakte, Vimeo, as well as numerous smaller forums and platforms.
The Chinese disinformation group, which drew particular attention, consisted of a network of 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Pages, 15 Groups, and 15 Instagram accounts, all managed by "geographically dispersed operators" across China. Their content spanned topics such as China, its Xinjiang province, criticism of U.S. policies, Western foreign policies, and critiques of the Chinese government.
In addition to this, Meta revealed that it blocked thousands of malicious website domains and efforts to create fake accounts and Pages related to the Russian operation known as Doppelganger. This operation has been linked to two companies: Structura National Technologies and Social Design Agency. Its primary focus was on emulating websites of mainstream news outlets and government entities to disseminate fake articles aimed at undermining support for Ukraine. Notably, this campaign expanded its scope from initially targeting France, Germany, and Ukraine to also encompass the United States and Israel.
One noteworthy technique employed in these covert operations was typosquatting, where malicious domains were used to impersonate legitimate news sites. This practice illustrates how malicious actors leverage deceptive domain names to evade detection and enforcement efforts.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2023/09/meta-takes-down-thousands-of-accounts.html