7 ms·
U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
- Brendinooo 5mo ago>Russian-linked Doppelganger operations have systematically cloned major media infrastructure (Reuters, The Washington Post, Fox News) using lookalike domains that replicate visual design and URL structure closely enough to pass casual inspection. This purpose-built impersonation infrastructure is supported by fake personas, AI-assisted content, and paid amplification across mainstream social platforms. Are there any live examples out there? Similar to how I like to look at scam/phishing emails to see how they work, I'm interested in seeing how sophisticated these are/are not.
- reddozen 5mo ago[flagged]
- jruohonen 5mo ago> Similar to how I like to look at scam/phishing emails to see how they work, I'm interested in seeing how sophisticated these are/are not. https://edmo.eu/publications/ai-political-influencers-the-new-gods-of-propaganda-and-disinformation/ https://edmo.eu/publications/ai-political-influencers-the-ne...
- stinkbeetle 5mo agoAre there any links to any of these Russian doppelganger propaganda sites? That seemed to just be a story about "influencers" and their AI slop.
- jruohonen 5mo agoIt is the world wide web so yes there should be plenty of links to those, but I do not have them.
- Brendinooo 5mo agoI did do some searching and any link I found was already dead (hence me asking here!), so it's not really helpful to say "there should be plenty of links".
- petre 5mo agoThey set up new ones, don't worry. And the propaganda is largely on brain rotting social media like tiktok and twitterx.
- reddozen 5mo agoDisinformation moved from page rank to the "feed" in 2018 when Douyin bought (read: acquired copyright they originally stole) Musically and rebranded to TikTok. Why does no one remember any of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_websites_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_websites_in_the_Unit...
- mikeyouse 5mo agoThey were largely taken down after Biden-admin actions in 2024 -- a contemporaneous story about some: https://dfrlab.org/2024/09/18/doppelganger-us-election/ https://dfrlab.org/2024/09/18/doppelganger-us-election/ With a few preserved/archived stories e.g. from FoxNews.top: https://web.archive.org/web/20230922135430/https:/www.fox-news.top/world/US-Is-Turning-into-a-Giant-Pyramid-Scheme.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230922135430/https:/www.fox-ne...
- markerz 5mo agoTook me a bit of digging but I found this screenshot of fox-news.in: https://urlscan.io/result/50f1da5b-5b1f-417c-91b8-8690638a6e5e/ https://urlscan.io/result/50f1da5b-5b1f-417c-91b8-8690638a6e... That URL is linked from https://assets.recordedfuture.com/insikt-report-pdfs/2023/ta-2023-1205.pdf https://assets.recordedfuture.com/insikt-report-pdfs/2023/ta... Which is linked from https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/russian-influence-network-doppelgangers-ai-content-tactics https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/russian-influence-ne...
- thrance 5mo agoThey made a right-wing Fox News? Why? Isn't it enough already?
- tmpz22 5mo agoLook at the urls on /r/conservative - they’re mostly fly by night websites. Its kind of embarassing actually.
- trueno 5mo agoi know the internet has some very not-okay socially never-going-to-be-adjusted and unhinged people on it. i dont doubt that some of them actually are in /r/conservative and think they're among good company. ...but im also mostly certain that sub is heavily gamed/botted and i suppose i'd be zero percent surprised if it was moderated by some hostile annoying nation state. your comment on the types of urls that get posted there is something ive noticed too. the entire subs entire history is weird and it feels like it exists on reddit so other redditors can say "i just checked in /r/conservative and ...". effectively reinforcing political division in the same internet environment in a very weird/unnatural way. i worked a blue collar job for a decade. worked 10 hour days with a lot of conservatives, magas even before i finally left boeing in 2021. met the whole variety of them. the ones who actually were insane, the ones who didnt want to associate with the current flavor of maga unhinged, but still wanted to disassociate from the woke left, and somehow accidentally tripped and fell and started listening to joe rogan... and also the usual middle class suburban parents who have just been conned by sinclaire owned local news. that was a ..... long decade of my life. i don't miss it, i never felt like i was among good company. but one thing i can say, is i never met a single one that used reddit back then & /r/conservative was allegedly popping off in those years. most of them called reddit idk like a "liberal shithole" or something and that was that. just seems kinda weird. above a certain age you're going to be glued to facebook/nextdoor, under that age you're probably financing a dodge ram and listening to joe rogan.. but rarely if ever were these people on reddit.
- TFNA 5mo agoIf you want fake personas, view X on a desktop browser through Nitter, a no-bloat interface which allows you to quickly middle-click and open many new tabs. If you go through the history of accounts commenting under pundits' political tweets, you'll soon notice that many accounts claiming to be real, honest-to-goodness Americans have profile photos from This Person Does Not Exist, and their posts are clearly bot-like. The posts are often LLM-generated (before they were manually written, but with telltale mistakes the writer was from Eastern Europe or elsewhere abroad), they might repeat every few days, and they're often single-mindedly about a single issue or two that even a fanatic real human wouldn't be so fixated on.
- avaer 5mo agoIt's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth. To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends. Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the only criterion is whether they can survive against other memes. Grounding in reality is an idea's death sentence, because of the bullshit asymmetry principle. And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet. I shudder to think what this means for elections. At least I appreciate that the article attaches some numbers to it.
- loeg 5mo ago> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet. This was always true, right? With enough $, you can employ N writers. But the constant factor is smaller than it once was.
- Retric 5mo agoOnly for relatively low values of N. It’s really difficult to scale organizations up and down for election cycles. Historically you’d quickly reach a point where each additional writer was more expensive than the last.
- tstrimple 5mo agoThey aren't scaled down between election cycles. The media ecosystem is almost fully captured by the billionaire class. We've seen directly how they change coverage and policies tilting things. Fox News never shut down between elections. They are always in campaign mode and the money keeps rolling in.
- Retric 5mo agoThat’s the low N I was talking about. As long as you can use those writers to operate a business near profitably then they are really cheap, but FOX can’t profitably employ 100,000 writers.
- himata4113 5mo agoThe problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will. To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions. Just to make myself clear, when I say politicians I mean someone who tries to bring politican change, not someone who works in the government making decisions. Democracy sounds nice, but it assumes people want to participate in it: actively validate facts, find truthful information not just vote whoever promises more of what you like. Of course on the other hand you have the european federation: they are able to make unpopular choices, but at a steep cost which ends up hurting the member states and making the general population pretty hateful of the european central government. Governments are too big to change, but what we have doesn't work and we're probably going to be in a world of hurt as the american type democracy(japan, australia, etc) is being manipulated from all sides, federations are uncompetitive and dictatorships becoming the strongest government there is being able to accelerate faster than anyone else and becoming the defacto world power.
- warkdarrior 5mo agoAgreed, someone should do something to fix the problem that you discussed so eloquently.
- himata4113 5mo agoI've just described the current politican system there's nothing to fix, it's a reality we live in. It's nothing more than a rant.
- 01100011 5mo agoEveryone pushes voting and sure, you should vote if you're able, but the other half of the puzzle is you need to have good options to vote for. Politicians are relatively low paid for the expertise we want and so many of the folks running are people looking to supplement their income with influence peddling and grift.
- Jimmc414 5mo agoI strongly recommend anyone interested to do a quick search of the leadership of checkpoint.com and if they have ties to any foreign intelligence.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- strictnein 5mo ago[flagged]
- Jimmc414 5mo agoThis has nothing to do with antisemitism and I shouldn’t have to say that. This is about unfair interference of a foreign power in US elections which I thought was the entire point of this post.
- strictnein 5mo ago[flagged]
- Jimmc414 5mo agoDo you also think the authors of this document intrinsically hate people of Russian descent or are they stating what they see as germane facts and inviting people to use their own judgment?
- platevoltage 5mo agoIt's so insane that we are still doing this. The mask is off.
- raincole 5mo agoIf you're not from Israel, Israeli companies are by definition foreign institutions to you. Pointing out a media company is owned by Chinese companies are not racism against Chinese. Same with Israel.
- dabinat 5mo agoI feel like this may be made worse by the rise in paywalls from media companies. I understand times are difficult and they need to make money, but it’s harder to counter disinformation if only those with money can see it. Disinformation will always be free to view.
- marcus_holmes 5mo agoThe open question of how journalists get paid is key to democracy, and still open.
- boredatoms 5mo agoMany countries have free news services though. Can read BBC and so on
- anonymousiam 5mo agoBBC is state funded, so it's technically not "free."
- boredatoms 5mo agoEvery service is somehow funded. Would you say NPR also isnt free?
- reddozen 5mo agoEven when journalism was free, no one read anything. Paywalls didn't make people less lazy to read articles. People are totally content mindlessly thumbing infinite scrolling apps. If you want to fix the average Americans low information media digest we need to start by banning the "algorithm".
- jimbob45 5mo agoThey’ve done this to my workplace too. We have several domains for employee-concerning content and they’ve mirrored them and placed them at the top of Google’s search results. If you’ve forgotten the URL and go to Google it, you can get phished super easily. I can see the elderly and the tech illiterate falling for similar schemes with mirrors of the NYT, CNN, FOX, etc.
- elevation 5mo agoI’m experimenting with serving different content to users based on the presence of an mTLS cert in their USB key. The idea is that authenticated employees see the company logo but scrapers get an IIS welcome page. Prevents cloned content from showing up on squatted domains.
- kderbe 5mo agoPBS NewsHour interviewed one of Check Point's security evangelists this evening to discuss this same report. The discussion is a bit broader in scope than this blog post. https://youtu.be/8bG7J3mjH5s?t=71 https://youtu.be/8bG7J3mjH5s?t=71 (I linked directly to the interview, skipping the news anchor's intro.)
- jake-mullins 5mo ago[dead]
- johnnienaked 5mo agoOur very strong and very domestic stupidiy, naivete, and ignorance is way more important of a factor than foreign influence.