russian hackers – DS https://www.anglinarchive.com Daily Stormer Historical Archive Wed, 10 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.0.17 https://www.anglinarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/cropped-favicon-32x32.png russian hackers – DS https://www.anglinarchive.com 32 32 Justice Department Bans “Fake” Social Media Accounts Over Pro-Russian Posts https://www.anglinarchive.com/2024/07/10/justice-department-bans-fake-social-media-accounts-over-pro-russian-posts/ Wed, 10 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Justice Department today announced the seizure of two domain names and the search of 968 social media accounts used by Russian actors to create an AI-enhanced social media bot farm that spread disinformation in the United States and abroad. Learn more: https://t.co/ibmqaruf5U pic.twitter.com/apWv6rGRYL

— FBI (@FBI) July 9, 2024

Remember when it was a secret that the US government was censoring media? And then they got caught and no one really ever explained it?

Well, now they just openly say they do it.

Because of Russians.

The Guardian:

The US Department of Justice said on Tuesday that it disrupted a Russian operation that used fake social media accounts enhanced by artificial intelligence to covertly spread pro-Kremlin messages in the United States and abroad.

The news comes four months before the US presidential election, which security experts widely believe will be the target of both hacking and covert social media influence attempts by foreign adversaries. Senior US officials have said publicly they are monitoring for schemes intended to disrupt the vote.

The justice department secured court approval to seize two domain names and search nearly 1,000 social media accounts allegedly associated with the effort.

…

The accounts on the social media platform X have since been banned. They commonly posted pro-Kremlin talking points, including videos of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and criticized the Ukrainian government.

The United States worked with Dutch authorities on the investigation. The campaign was run from a server in the Netherlands, according to investigators.

Remember when they told you Hunter Biden’s laptop was the Russians? That Julian Assange was the Russians?

That Donald Trump was a Russian?

Frankly, it’s not even clear that it would be illegal for Russians to support candidates in US elections.

It’s certainly not illegal for Americans to support Russians.

What is going on with Twitter’s community notes?

But there is no law.

So these people can just do whatever.

]]> Bold Jews Claim Anyone Supporting Trump Over DeSantis and Randhawa is a Bot…! https://www.anglinarchive.com/2023/03/07/bold-jews-claim-anyone-supporting-trump-over-desantis-and-randhawa-is-a-bot/ Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Related: People Disagree with Great Satan Because China Spends Billions on “Disinformation” Campaign, US Envoy Says

I wondered why I woke up this morning with a strange urge to oil my gears and rev my engine – it turns out, I’m a robot!

That’s why I don’t support Indian female Nimrata Randhawa for president of America!

New York Post:

A network of bots have been busily singing the praises of former President Donald Trump while targeting his political rivals Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — as well as trolling critics like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to a report on Monday.

The fake accounts — estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands — are behind popularizing the suggestion that DeSantis, 44, would be unable to defeat Trump, 76, for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination but would make a good running mate.

They also attacked Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration and the only other declared 2024 GOP candidate.

One of the accounts went so far as to label McConnell (R-Ky.) a “traitor.”

An Israeli tech firm, Cyabra, discovered the network and shared its findings with the Associated Press.

Related: Huge Investigation Reveals the Real Election Meddlers and Hackers: Israeli Jews!

“One account will say, ‘Biden is trying to take our guns; Trump was the best,’ and another will say, ‘Jan. 6 was a lie and Trump was innocent,’” Jules Gross, the Cyabra engineer who first discovered the network, told the AP. “Those voices are not people. For the sake of democracy I want people to know this is happening.”

The identities of those behind the fake accounts are unknown, but Cyabra determined that the network was likely created in the United States.

Whoever created the ​army of bots is working to tip the scales in next year’s GOP primary by employing cyber techniques perfected in 2016 by Russian hackers while manipulating Twitter’s algorithms to increase circulation in an attempt to sway political discussion.

The pro-Trump network is composed of three separate account networks that were created in April, October and November of 2022.

The accounts display photos of the alleged account holder as well as a name. Some post their own content while others repost messages from real users to expand the reach of the information.

Overall, the networks created the false impression online that the former president has amassed a large bloc of support.

It’s funny that it’s an Israeli company, because this claim that anyone who disagrees with the Jews is a bot is very much in line with the Jewish religion, which says that anyone who isn’t Jewish is not human.

There is no more extreme form of dehumanization than telling people that their personal beliefs are not real and they only think they believe these things they believe because either they are a robot or they have been manipulated by robots.

This is a way to totally negate the agency of the population in forming their own thoughts. You remove any kind of debate or discussion, and just say that the views of your opponents are not valid because your opponents are not even human beings with the ability to think and process information.

It should outrage everyone that this is something that is considered valid in the public discourse, given that it is so transparent that there are no Russian bots and this language is designed as a way to dehumanize and discredit everything Jews disagree with. But apparently people are much too stupid to even process what is going on here.

So then… maybe the Jews are right about the goyim?

Is that the final red pill…?

]]> Huge Investigation Reveals the Real Election Meddlers and Hackers: Israeli Jews! https://www.anglinarchive.com/2023/02/15/huge-investigation-reveals-the-real-election-meddlers-and-hackers-israeli-jews/ Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m shocked to hear that God’s chosen ones would ever do something dishonest.

The Guardian:

A team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media has been exposed in a new investigation.

The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades.

He is being unmasked by an international consortium of journalists. Hanan and his unit, which uses the codename “Team Jorge”, have been exposed by undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian.

Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”

Tal Hanan

The investigation reveals extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge, which runs a private service offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.

Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.

One of Team Jorge’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts.

The consortium of journalists that investigated Team Jorge includes reporters from 30 outlets including Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País. The project, part of a wider investigation into the disinformation industry, has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.

The undercover footage was filmed by three reporters, who approached Team Jorge posing as prospective clients.

In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news outlets, which are then amplified by the Aims bot-management software.

Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair.

The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms, which have for years struggled to prevent nefarious actors spreading falsehoods or breaching the security on their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies around the world.

The Team Jorge revelations could cause embarrassment for Israel, which has come under growing diplomatic pressure in recent years over its export of cyber-weaponry that undermines democracy and human rights.

Hanan appears to have run at least some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to promote defence exports. The Israeli MoD did not respond to requests for comment.

The undercover footage

Given their expertise in subterfuge, it is perhaps surprising that Hanan and his colleagues allowed themselves to be exposed by undercover reporters. Journalists using conventional methods have struggled to shed light on the disinformation industry, which is at pains to avoid detection.

The secretly filmed meetings, which took place between July and December 2022, therefore provide a rare window into the mechanics of disinformation for hire.

Three journalists – from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker – approached Team Jorge pretending to be consultants working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying an election.

The encounters with Hanan and his colleagues took place via video calls and an in-person meeting in Team Jorge’s base, an unmarked office in an industrial park in Modi’in, 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.

Hanan described his team as “graduates of government agencies”, with expertise in finance, social media and campaigns, as well as “psychological warfare”, operating from six offices around the world. Four of Hanan’s colleagues attended the meetings, including his brother, Zohar Hanan, who was described as the chief executive of the group.

In his initial pitch to the potential clients, Hanan claimed: “We are now involved in one election in Africa … We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates … You follow the leads. [We have completed] 33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful.” Later, he said he was involved in two “major projects” in the US but claimed not to engage directly in US politics.

It was not possible to verify all of Team Jorge’s claims in the undercover meetings, and Hanan may have been embellishing them in order to secure a lucrative deal with prospective clients. For example, it appears Hanan may have inflated his fees when discussing the cost of his services.

Team Jorge told the reporters they would accept payments in a variety of currencies, including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, or cash. He said he would charge between €6m and €15m for interference in elections.

This is going to get less coverage than East Palestine.

It’s shocking the Guardian is even mentioning it (although they do tend to be a lot better about these things than the New York Times, which does not have a big story up about this).

]]> Kremlin Denies New Claims by The Guardian of a Conspiracy with Donald Trump https://www.anglinarchive.com/2021/07/16/kremlin-denies-new-claims-by-the-guardian-of-a-conspiracy-with-donald-trump/ Fri, 16 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000
The Statue of Liberty poem, which is the basis for American law, says that we must believe journalists even when they are lying. It’s our values.

Vladimir Putin can deny all he likes – he will never be able to come up with a believable explanation as to why the Jewish media would lie about something like this.

In America and the UK, we have faith in our media, and we believe whatever they say, even when it is outrageous and doesn’t make any sense. We believe because it is our values that the media is defending our democracy.

Democracies will never accept the theoretical capacity of Jewish media to behave in a dishonest fashion.

RT:

Moscow has reacted furiously to a series of claims, backed up with anonymous and unverifiable sources, that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his security officials to support Donald Trump’s campaign to become US president.

In comments made exclusively to RT on Thursday evening, Putin’s spokesman slammed the report, published in the UK’s Guardian newspaper earlier that day. “This is total fiction,” Dmitry Peskov remarked. “Strictly speaking, it is complete nonsense. Of course, this is the hallmark of an absolutely low-quality publication. Either the newspaper is trying to somehow increase its popularity or is sticking to a rabidly Russophobic line.”

The article, authored by British journalist Luke Harding and two other staffers at the outlet, claimed that Putin had “Personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, during a closed session of Russia’s national security council.” The bombshell revelations were purportedly based on “what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.”

Harding has a history of publishing false stories related to the so-called “Russiagate” conspiracy theory, which became popular after Trump was elected to America’s highest office. In 2018, for instance, he published a completely fake tale about dissident publisher Julian Assange and the American lobbyist Paul Manafort supposedly having met in London. The article was also based on anonymous ‘sources.’ Although the allegation has been thoroughly debunked, the Guardian has refused to correct the record.

While working in Moscow in 2007, Harding was accused of plagiarism by The Exile, a small, independent and now defunct magazine. His employer issued an apology at the time.

According to Thursday’s report, top Kremlin officials agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them encouraging “social turmoil” in the US and “a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.” This is despite the frequently fractious state of relations between the two nations and the imposition of sanctions during the Republicans time in office.

“Certainly, all of this does not correspond and cannot possibly be based on the truth. It is fundamentally not true,” Peskov said. “This is either part of an ongoing attempt to demonize Russia and Putin, which The Guardian loves to do from time to time, or it is a desperate attempt to attract some new readers by publishing such tales.”

It makes no difference if the journalist is a plagiarist and a liar spreading false information in order to support a globalist war campaign against Russia. The validity of these claims are no more relevant than the truthfulness of the claims of a woman who is lying about rape.

The only thing that matters is that we believe the story, just like we believe in rape hoaxes. It’s our values that we believe all women and journalists, even when they’re lying.

Claiming that we should believe facts over our own Jewish media agencies is an insult to the American soldiers who died fighting the Confederacy and the Nazis in order to support trans rights.

The chant by marines on the front lines fighting against the Nazis was very clear:

We will never waver in our fight against the communist Russians, who are trying as we speak to use Donald Trump to install fascism in America.

We will never forget the importance of our values, because our values is who we are.

]]> Ransomware Attack: Hundreds of Businesses Get Hit in Latest Cyber Hoax https://www.anglinarchive.com/2021/07/04/ransomware-attack-hundreds-of-businesses-get-hit-in-latest-cyber-hoax/ Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The plan is a hoax “cyber pandemic” to follow up the hoax virus pandemic.

It’s all unfolding, in front of us.

They don’t have any evidence this has anything to do with Russia.

If Russia was doing it, they would be assisting the World Economic Forum’s cyber pandemic hoax.

AP:

A ransomware attack paralyzed the networks of at least 200 U.S. companies on Friday, according to a cybersecurity researcher whose company was responding to the incident.

The REvil gang, a major Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate, appears to be behind the attack, said John Hammond of the security firm Huntress Labs. He said the criminals targeted a software supplier called Kaseya, using its network-management package as a conduit to spread the ransomware through cloud-service providers. Other researchers agreed with Hammond’s assessment.

“Kaseya handles large enterprise all the way to small businesses globally, so ultimately, (this) has the potential to spread to any size or scale business,” Hammond said in a direct message on Twitter. “This is a colossal and devastating supply chain attack.”

Such cyberattacks typically infiltrate widely used software and spread malware as it updates automatically.

It was not immediately clear how many Kaseya customers might be affected or who they might be. Kaseya urged customers in a statement on its website to immediately shut down servers running the affected software. It said the attack was limited to a “small number” of its customers.

Brett Callow, a ransomware expert at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, said he was unaware of any previous ransomware supply-chain attack on this scale. There have been others, but they were fairly minor, he said.

…

Hammond of Huntress said he was aware of four managed-services providers — companies that host IT infrastructure for multiple customers — being hit by the ransomware, which encrypts networks until the victims pay off attackers. He said thousand of computers were hit.

“We currently have three Huntress partners who are impacted with roughly 200 businesses that have been encrypted,” Hammond said.

Hammond wrote on Twitter: “Based on everything we are seeing right now, we strongly believe this (is) REvil/Sodinikibi.” The FBI linked the same ransomware provider to a May attack on JBS SA, a major global meat processer.

The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement late Friday that it is closely monitoring the situation and working with the FBI to collect more information about its impact.

CISA urged anyone who might be affected to “follow Kaseya’s guidance to shut down VSA servers immediately.” Kaseya runs what’s called a virtual system administrator, or VSA, that’s used to remotely manage and monitor a customer’s network.

The privately held Kaseya says it is based in Dublin, Ireland, with a U.S. headquarters in Miami. The Miami Herald recently described it as “one of Miami’s oldest tech companies” in a report about its plans to hire as many as 500 workers by 2022 to staff a recently acquired cybersecurity platform.

This is all just happening all the sudden – after having been predicted by the World Economic Forum.

They always claim they’re just talking about “how to manage it when it arrives” – but how did they know it would arrive in 2021?

People on podcasts and Bitchute were saying “oh, we talked about the coming cyber pandemic so much that they decided not to do it.”

Well.

I think they are probably still going to do it.

This is all part of the ongoing agenda to collapse the total infrastructure of the West.

They are going to try to push some kind of “real ID” system for using the internet. The Vaxx Passport is already taking over. This is all headed to a total biometrics system, where to enter any building, or to log on to the internet, you need enter biometric data to confirm you’re not an unvaxxed, white supremacist, Russian hacker.

]]> FBI Blames Russia for Meat Hacking https://www.anglinarchive.com/2021/06/03/fbi-blames-russia-for-meat-hacking/ Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

They hacked us, kid.

Hacked us right in our meat sacks.

BBC News:

A Russian cyber-criminal group was behind a ransomware attack that has targeted the world’s largest meat processing company, the FBI has said.

The FBI said it would was working to bring the REvil group to justice for the hack on JBS.

The cyber-breach over the weekend shut some JBS operations in the US, Canada and Australia.

REvil – also known as Sodinokibi – is one of the most prolific and profitable cyber-criminal groups in the world.

“We have attributed the JBS attack to REvil and Sodinokibi and are working diligently to bring the threat actors to justice,” the FBI statement said.

“We continue to focus our efforts on imposing risk and consequences and holding the responsible cyber actors accountable.”

The White House said on Wednesday that US President Joe Biden would bring up the issue of cyber-attacks when he meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in two weeks.

“Responsible states do not harbour ransomware criminals,” said press secretary Jen Psaki.

This all sounds totally real and completely unrelated to the US Government’s attempt to start a world war with Russia and China or the cyber pandemic announced at both the 2020 and 2021 Davos Forum.

I’ll tell ya, it’s hard to trust the government these days. But if there’s one group you can trust, it’s the FBI. They’re an organization committed to equity and social justice.

They’re honest people and they have a special legitimacy when it comes to speaking on the issue of Russian hackers.

]]> Russian Hackers Hacked Anti-Vaccination Thoughts Into Americans’ Brains https://www.anglinarchive.com/2020/09/27/russian-hackers-hacked-anti-vaccination-thoughts-into-americans-brains/ Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Rare photograph of a Russian hacker, taken right after he participated in the Great Election Hacking.

People who voted for Trump had their brains hacked by Russian hackers all the way back in 2016.

Now, Russian hackers have kicked it up a notch, and set their eyes on the big prize: they’re hacking people’s brains to make them distrust the coronavirus vaccine. This is part of a Russian plan to cause billions of Americans to die from the deadly virus.

If you are experiencing an urge to refuse the coronavirus vaccine, then you’ve been hacked.

Study Finds:

Russian interference in the 2016 election has been a constant topic of conversation for four years. A report by researchers from multiple universities says politics isn’t the only issue foreign governments may be seeking to influence. The analysis reveals evidence of tweets by Russian troll accounts talking about vaccinations. These tweets, coming during the 2016 election cycle, include both pro- and anti-vaccination messaging targeting social media users with certain political beliefs.

Researchers claim the posts come from a variety of fake persona types and accounts under the control of the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA).

The collaboration by experts from the University of Pennsylvania, Georgia State University, and SUNY Buffalo examined more than 2.8 million tweets from 2,689 accounts run by the IRA from 2015 to 2017. In all, the researchers found nine separate fake personas, including fake Black Lives Matter activists and fake supporters of President Donald Trump. The team also examines the extent to which these personas fed current ideas about vaccination in the United States and how.

The study demonstrates how these fake IRA accounts sow discord among Americans on the issue of vaccines. It also shows how they flesh out the personalities of their fake accounts in a way that enhances their credibility.

Overall, the deliberately polarizing vaccination tweets make up a small percentage of the messaging by Russian trolls over the three years of the study. However, by using pro and anti-vaccination tweets, the trolls could establish partisan identities that appear realistic. By tweeting in this way, they could affect attitudes, magnify healthcare disparities, and promote vaccination hesitancy — a particularly dangerous idea during the COVID-19 outbreak.

“Russian trolls worked to polarize Americans on a health topic that is not supposed to be political,” says co-author Yotam Ophir, in a media release. “As our nation deals with the coronavirus pandemic, that type of politicization poisons the well of crisis communications for COVID-19 in ways that create tensions, mistrust and, potentially, a lack of intention to comply with government orders and health directives.”

…

“Even if small in magnitude, the intentional Russian spread of antivaccine discourse targeted at specific subpopulations that are susceptible to it (i.e., pro-Trump users and African Americans on Twitter) could be the beginning of a new front in the ongoing informational cyberwar,” the study authors conclude.

The researchers state that vaccination is not supposed to be political, but what does that mean, exactly?

Does that mean that you’re not supposed to have a political opinion on whether or not the government should forcefully inject you with a mystery liquid that will alter your DNA?

They’re implying that everyone should agree on the topic of vaccines, independently of whether or not they agree on other “political” topics. It’s nonsense.

Furthermore, just as they did with the whole “Russian meddling” hoax, they’re trying to produce a kind of button that they can push to immediately deactivate debate on specific issues.

It is another gear in the censorship machinery.

People should be able to decide whether to get a vaccine or not, and in order to do that, they need to be able to talk about it.

]]> FBI Director Shills Russian Meddling Hoax Hard https://www.anglinarchive.com/2020/09/18/fbi-director-shills-russian-meddling-hoax-hard/ Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday shilled the nonsense concept that Antifa is an idea that isn’t made up of organized people.

But that wasn’t the only thing he shilled on Thursday.

The alleged paranoid maniac also promoted the stupid Russia hoax, claiming that Russian agents are once again hacking the election to secure Donald Trump’s presidency.

Axios:

FBI Director Chris Wray on Thursday told Congress the bureau has seen “very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,” primarily to “denigrate Vice President Biden and what the Russians see as kind of an anti-Russian establishment.”

Why it matters: It confirms previous statements from various intelligence officials about Russia’s interference activities, which continue with less than 50 days until the election.

The efforts have been through proxies on social media and have aimed to “sow divisiveness and discord,” Wray said.

Yes, but: Unlike in 2016, the Russians have not targeted election infrastructure, according to Wray.

What they’re saying: Wray said that his biggest concern related to election security is the “steady drumbeat of misinformation and sort of amplification of smaller cyber intrusions” that could sow distrust in the results of the election.

The FBI director called for trust in the electoral process, but said he fears “people will take on a feeling of futility because of all of the noise and confusion that’s generated, and that’s a very hard problem to combat.”

On Thursday evening, President Trump responded to Wray’s testimony, tweeting: “But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia. They will both, plus others, be able to interfere in our 2020 Election without totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam.

That tweet was of course marked by Twitter staff as being a lie.

This is just nutty, all of it.

It is just unfathomable that we had that three year long debacle, where the last FBI director, James Comey, was caught in a conspiracy to hoax a Russian conspiracy, and now, four years later, the new FBI director is out there doing the exact same thing.

And the media response is not to call him out as a liar, not to say, “bro, we’ve already seen this hoax before” – no! The media’s response is to get really, really concerned!

This is deranged! It’s sick!

What is going on!

If Christopher Wray was legitimately just a paranoid lunatic, surely he wouldn’t have simply shrugged off the Antifa issue…!

He’s a liar and he’s involved in a conspiracy to undermine the United States!

The FBI and Justice Department must be investigated!

]]> Real Factual News: Russians Just Hacked Joe Biden https://www.anglinarchive.com/2020/09/10/real-factual-news-russians-just-hacked-joe-biden/ Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000
“The Man in the Virus Mask”: This photograph of Joe in his mask is really artistic and interesting. It looks a bit like it belongs on the cover of a 1930s crime novel.

Bad news: the Russians hacked Joe Biden.

Absolutely dastardly.

Reuters:

Microsoft Corp recently alerted one of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s main election campaign advisory firms that it had been targeted by suspected Russian state-backed hackers, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The hacking attempts targeted staff at Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a campaign strategy and communications firm working with Biden and other prominent Democrats, over the past two months, the sources said.

A person familiar with SKDK’s response to the attempts said the hackers failed to gain access to the firm’s networks. “They are well-defended, so there has been no breach,” the person said.

SKDK Vice Chair Hilary Rosen declined to comment. A Biden spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the allegations as “nonsense”. Moscow has repeatedly denied using hacking to interfere in other countries’ elections.

It is actually literal nonsense.

At this point, if Microsoft or the State Department suggested that the best way to stop Russian hackers is to do human sacrifices, the media would report it as fact.

It’s all just so dumb. I come from a good Christian family; I shouldn’t have to engage with this type of weird gibberish.

The hacking attempts on SKDK come as U.S. intelligence agencies have raised alarms about possible efforts by foreign governments to interfere in the November presidential election.

Investigations by former special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate intelligence committee both concluded that affiliates of the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and Mueller has warned that Russia was meddling in the current campaign.

One of the sources said it was not clear whether Biden’s campaign was the target or whether the hackers were attempting to gain access to information about other SKDK clients.

SKDK managing director Anita Dunn was a White House communications director during the Barack Obama presidency and serves the Biden campaign as a senior advisor.

The attempts to infiltrate SKDK were recently flagged to the campaign firm by Microsoft, which identified hackers tied to the Russian government as the likely culprits, according to the three sources briefed on the matter.

The attacks included phishing, a hacking method which seeks to trick users into disclosing passwords, as well as other efforts to infiltrate SKDK’s network, the three sources said.

There you go.

In paragraph 11, we find out that when they said “hacking,” they meant email phishing. Also, “other efforts.”

This has to be the most unserious country that has ever existed, that grown adults can read this and think it is serious.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: this entire “Russian hackers” thing is like talking about evil spirits or ghosts.

It’s the same phenomenon, psychologically, that you can get people to believe in something without any evidence in order to manipulate them. A hacker, like a ghost, is beyond the comprehension of a normal person, having invisible powers to effect change.

Related: Accusations of Consorting with Russian Hackers are No Different Than Accusations of Consorting with the Devil

You can’t prove someone hacked something just like you can’t prove that a house is haunted or a person is possessed by demons or practicing witchcraft.

I will say that if the headlines said, “email phishing,” the general reaction would probably be different. People probably know what that is, and probably also know at least on some level that you can’t just figure out who sent a phishing email.

Maybe people can also imagine that all kinds of people want to get access to all kinds of networks for all kinds of reasons (usually financial, rather than political), and mass sending automated phishing emails is very cheap?

Probably they can’t imagine that people who want to blame Russia for things could be sending out phishing emails and then blaming Russia for them. Because you’re not allowed to say those two Latin words in our current paradigm.

]]> Washington Firm Caught Running Fake Facebook Accounts Pushing for Revolution in Enemy Countries https://www.anglinarchive.com/2020/09/05/washington-firm-caught-running-fake-facebook-accounts-pushing-for-revolution-in-enemy-countries/ Sat, 05 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The State Department running fake social media accounts to foment revolution isn’t some new thing. This methodology was first rolled out during the Arab Spring, nearly a decade ago.

It’s cheap and easy and it works.

By the way, this is what they were basically accusing Russia of doing in 2016. Though there was never any evidence they did this, this is what the US government defines as “foreign election meddling.”

Washington Post:

When Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself the nation’s legitimate president in January 2019, an Instagram account, @FrenteLibreVzla, posted a video declaring him a “new leader” who would bring freedom to the embattled nation, according to a research report published Friday.

Those watching the video had no way of knowing the account was based not in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, but downtown Washington, managed by a strategic communications firm with clients across Latin America.

The firm, CLS Strategies, this week became the latest communications company to be chastised by Facebook for using fake accounts — including on Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary — to secretly manipulate politics in another country, in violation of Facebook’s prohibition on foreign interference.

CLS Strategies said Friday that it had launched an internal investigation in conjunction with an outside law firm and put the head of its Latin American practice on administrative leave. But it disputed that its activities amount to foreign interference, saying the clients it was representing were located in the affected countries.

Yeah, I’m sure.

“Importantly, our past client work in Latin America, including opposition to oppressive regimes, was not conducted on behalf of foreign entities — the work was funded and directed by clients inside each country. This makes CLS’s work very different from the foreign influence activities reported by Facebook, and any characterization of CLS’ work in the three countries at issue as ‘foreign’ is wrong,” CLS Strategies’ chief executive Bob Chlopak said in a statement.

“We take very seriously the issues raised by Facebook and others regarding CLS’ past advertising in Latin America,” Chlopak said in his statement, adding that the company wants to “ensure future work of CLS meets the highest standards of transparency and advertising platforms.”

Facebook announced Tuesday it had closed 55 accounts, 42 pages and 36 Instagram accounts linked to CLS Strategies that targeted politics in Venezuela, Bolivia and Mexico. The effort spent $3.6 million in advertising across all three countries, a sum that Facebook executives said was notable for its size and reflective of what happens when actors with deep pockets mount a disinformation operation. The pages had amassed more than 500,000 followers, Facebook said.

Friday’s report, by the Stanford Internet Observatory, a disinformation research group that had been provided data by Facebook, focused on the accounts active in Bolivia and Venezuela, including several real accounts operated by CLS Strategies employees. The researchers did not find that the accounts closed by Facebook operated in tandem to artificially amplify content, but they found that 11 of the accounts targeting Bolivia were opened in the same time period, in February 2020, and listed four managers in the United States, one in Bolivia and one in Venezuela.
The report also noted that CLS Strategies employees had previous professional ties to opposition political leaders in Venezuela.

The accounts targeting Bolivia supported Interim President Jeanine Áñez and criticized her predecessor, Evo Morales, who resigned amid nationwide protests in November after nearly 14 years in office.

One of the fake Facebook pages, Prohibido olvidar, posted content mainly about allegations of electoral fraud by Morales and had 524 likes and 595 followers, the report found. It said that another fake Bolivian Facebook page, Bolificado, portrayed itself as a fact-checking operation and on at least one occasion contradicted the findings of authentic Bolivian fact checkers, labeling a true story “FAKE NEWS” in bold red letters.

The Stanford report described the trend of hiring a public relations or marketing firm to conduct a disinformation operation as increasingly common, noting that Facebook has conducted takedowns against communications firms in Israel, Canada, India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — and now, the United States — for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior.

“It’s apparent that these campaigns have become a lucrative and in-demand service, and there are a host of digital marketing firms willing to provide them and profit off of them,” the report said.

595 followers, lol.

 

If I was not an utterly hopeless romantic, I could make about a bajillion dollars running one of these firms.

I could make a bajillion dollars doing a lot of things. I hope you people appreciate that fact. I’m here only because it’s the right thing for me to be doing.

It’s kind of hilarious that WaPo is pretending this group isn’t obviously being contracted by the State Department. But for some reason, even Donald Trump’s State Department is not something that the media wants to question, ever.

Funny how that all works.

Also – to just to go ahead and state the obvious – they’re doing this in America too.

Huge numbers of popular social media accounts in all of the various political fields are run by these sorts of firms, contracted by the State Department and the CIA, for the purposes of engineering society.

Remember: official “Anonymous” accounts support war in Syria, lol.

Official white nationalist accounts support Black Lives Matter.

You know – so on and so forth.

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