The Iran-US-Israel conflict integrates missile strikes with cyberattacks and hacktivist campaigns, causing internet outages and spreading malicious apps.

Source: Cyble

Artificial Intelligence or AI is a real technology buzz word. It has dominated global news stories and is seen as the great new leap forward in modern technology that will have a transformative effect on all our daily lives. Whereas the advantages to the civilian sector seem positive, good and acceptable. There has been a darker cloud over the military use of AI in terms of its morality. Also,…

Russian trolls are trying to leave the world with the impression that there is massive support for Vladimir Putin’s quagmire in Ukraine.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has exposed a Russian troll farm, Cyber Front Z, whose operations via Telegram and social media were aimed to create an appearance of massive support for Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.   

That’s according to the company’s Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report.

Like the catastrophic invasion itself, the social media effort has been “clumsy and largely ineffective“.

This deceptive operation was “clumsy and largely ineffective,” the report reads, describing it as “a poorly executed attempt, publicly coordinated via a Telegram channel, to create a perception of grassroots online support for Russia’s invasion by using fake accounts to post pro-Russia comments on content by influencers and media.”

The investigation found attempts at driving comments to people’s content on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. The targets included politicians, journalists, actors, celebrities and commercial brands from around the world — anyone who might have spoken out in support of Ukraine.

It appears that hired “trolls” worked in shifts seven days a week, with a daily brief break for lunch. The operation had an overt and a covert component. Overtly, they ran a Telegram channel that regularly called on its followers to go to particular accounts or posts by public figures or news media and flood them with pro-Russia comments. Covertly, they ran fake accounts that posted such comments themselves — likely to make it look as if their crowdsourcing had been effective.

In total, 45 Facebook accounts and 1,037 Instagram profiles, affiliated with Cyber Front Z, have been blocked.

I wonder how many of the people at the St. Petersburg troll factory have fled the country since the start of the special operation war.

A second wave of Russians is fleeing Putin’s regime

Thanks to the brain drain from Russia, Putin may have to rely on second-rate trolls these days.

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and detail how Russia launched a secret multi-agency effort to interfere in Western democracy

According to leaked official Kremlin documents, Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 USA presidential election.

The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs, and senior ministers in a closed session of Russia’s national security council.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the USA and weakening the American president’s negotiating position.

In a decree bearing Putin’s signature, Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, who they described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable, and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.”

Report “No 32-04 \ vd” confirms that the Kremlin possesses kompromat (compromising material) on Trump, collected from his earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory.”

Putin has repeatedly denied accusations of interfering in Western democracy, but these official documents contradict his claim.

The papers set out a route map for what actually happened in 2016 - how the Russian president, his spy officers, and senior ministers were all intimately involved in one of the most important and audacious espionage operations of the 21st century:

A successful plot to put the “mentally unstable and unbalanced” Trump in the White House.

Pro-Trumpism - and anti-democracy moves such as gerrymandering, limiting voter freedom, expanding the police state, and so on - aids Russia and harms American democracy.

So next time you see someone blatantly supporting Russian Puppet Trump, know that they're not only okay with racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, and all his other sins, now they also support anti-Americanism.