Facebook Says Ukraine Military Accounts Were Hacked To Post Calls For Surrender (arstechnica.com) 25
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook today reported an increase in attacks on accounts run by Ukraine military personnel. In some cases, attackers took over accounts and posted "videos calling on the Army to surrender," but Facebook said it blocked sharing of the videos. Specifically, Facebook owner Meta's Q1 2022 Adversarial Threat Report said it has "seen a further spike in compromise attempts aimed at members of the Ukrainian military by Ghostwriter," a hacking campaign that "typically targets people through email compromise and then uses that to gain access to their social media accounts across the Internet." Ghostwriter has been linked to the Belarusian government.
"Since our last public update [on February 27], this group has attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel," Meta wrote today. Ghostwriter successfully hacked into the accounts in "a handful of cases" in which "they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared." In its February 27 update, Meta said it detected Ghostwriter's "attempts to target people on Facebook to post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including one video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest while flying a white flag of surrender." Meta said it had "taken steps to secure accounts that we believe were targeted by this threat actor" and "blocked phishing domains these hackers used to try to trick people in Ukraine into compromising their online accounts." But Ghostwriter continued its operations and hacked into accounts of Ukrainian military personnel, as previously mentioned.
Separately, Facebook recently removed a network of Russian accounts that were trying to silence Ukrainians by reporting "fictitious policy violations." "Under our Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, we removed a network in Russia for abusing our reporting tools to repeatedly report people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations of Facebook policies in an attempt to silence them," Meta said today. Providing more detail in its quarterly report, Meta said the removed network included 200 accounts operated from Russia. "The individuals behind it coordinated to falsely report people for various violations, including hate speech, bullying, and inauthenticity, in an attempt to have them and their posts removed from Facebook. The majority of these fictitious reports focused on people in Ukraine and Russia, but the network also reported users in Israel, the United States, and Poland," the report said.
"Since our last public update [on February 27], this group has attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel," Meta wrote today. Ghostwriter successfully hacked into the accounts in "a handful of cases" in which "they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared." In its February 27 update, Meta said it detected Ghostwriter's "attempts to target people on Facebook to post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including one video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest while flying a white flag of surrender." Meta said it had "taken steps to secure accounts that we believe were targeted by this threat actor" and "blocked phishing domains these hackers used to try to trick people in Ukraine into compromising their online accounts." But Ghostwriter continued its operations and hacked into accounts of Ukrainian military personnel, as previously mentioned.
Separately, Facebook recently removed a network of Russian accounts that were trying to silence Ukrainians by reporting "fictitious policy violations." "Under our Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, we removed a network in Russia for abusing our reporting tools to repeatedly report people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations of Facebook policies in an attempt to silence them," Meta said today. Providing more detail in its quarterly report, Meta said the removed network included 200 accounts operated from Russia. "The individuals behind it coordinated to falsely report people for various violations, including hate speech, bullying, and inauthenticity, in an attempt to have them and their posts removed from Facebook. The majority of these fictitious reports focused on people in Ukraine and Russia, but the network also reported users in Israel, the United States, and Poland," the report said.
Well... (Score:2)
...nobody should expect a russian troll farmer to be all that convincing, just look at the dreck they spew here
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
...nobody should expect a russian troll farmer to be all that convincing, just look at the dreck they spew here
Russian propaganda is not designed to be convincing. It is designed to spread doubt, division, and cynicism.
The West: We tell the truth, and Russia lies.
Russia: Everybody lies.
Russia wins every time the West is caught lying.
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That's what Hannah Arendt said about totalitarian states:
A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true. — Hannah Arendt, book The Origins of Totalitarianism
Claiming "everybody does it" is the sure mark of an authoritarian. There is an element of truth in it; everyone tells at least a self-interested version of the truth. What's misleading is that it misses the really important bit about a free country: control of the narrative isn't centralized in party hands.
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TLDR, some Infinity-cel stuff
How I Cucked the Zuck [knowyourmeme.com]
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Zelinskyy had some insightful comments when first tfg tried to use him. It was basically, American's are naive and should watch out, Ukrainians tho, are used to it
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Russia wins every time the West is caught lying.
The West: "A boy in a dress (or a girl's swimsuit) is a girl. Any dissent means you are a hateful bigot."
The West: "Half of US voters are straight up old fashioned racists."
The West: "Riots not started by The Party are "insurrections". (Actual seizing of territory and declaring of "autonomous zones", of course, are not.)"
Yeah, if "the West" wants to be seen as a paragon of truth telling, it might help to stop with all the lies ...
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You're quibbling about the percentage, whether it's 100% or 50% or 25%, as if that can obscure the fact a major party's presidentical candidate called would what end up being THIRTY MILLION people who voted for Trump -- and that's not even counting all Trump supporters -- "bad" people, and most of the left agreed with her. There is something seriously malfunctioning in a society where that happens, on multiple levels.
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trumpâ(TM)s supporte
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J.R.R. Tokien based Mordor on Stalin's Russia. Stalin is gone, but the cesspool remains.
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That in itself creates a sample bias from the getgo. Then there's also the perception bias where we might think of Russian people around here that behave "normal" as being like us, and not Russian. This also happens all the time with things like political views, religion, dietary choices, where people that behave "normal" aren't
No one surrenders (Score:2)
No one surrenders in a war they are winning.
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The stakes for the Ukrainians are extremely high here because even if they surrender it looks like a death sentence since the invaders seem to be murdering the civilians anyway.
It could be applicable to Russia though. They're technically still winning the territories in the eastern parts of Ukraine by looking at how it's going. But that did cost them a lot.
Public suppor
Desperate (Score:3)
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Telemetry, ads, manipulation (Score:2)
Security is clearly at the bottom of the totem pole.
Ukrainian response: (Score:2)
Blyat.
Nations should take up a policy like Sweden: (Score:1)
If Sweden is attacked by another country, we will
never give up. All information to the effect that
resistance is to cease is false.
IF CRISIS OR WAR COMES, IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR THE POPULATION OF SWEDEN May 2018 Page 12
ISBN: 978-91-7383-836-8
https://s3.documentcloud.org/d... [documentcloud.org]
Surrender to whom? (Score:2)
(Irony intended, in case my desired tone did not convey correctly)