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RRN: a complex and persistent information manipulation campaign
Summary
Since spring 2022, Viginum has identified a digital information manipulation campaign targeting several European States, including France. This campaign aims to undermine Western suppport for Ukraine, mainly by spreading the narrative that Western populations would allegedly support Russia. Because of the central role of the media Reliable Recent News, the main source of the above-mentioned narrative, this campaign has been named RRN.
Particularly persistent, the RRN campaign relies on several modus operandi:
- creating websites wich share audio-visual content criticizing Ukrainian leaders;
- impersonating the identity of national media outlets and European governmental websites via typosquatting their domain name;
- creating French-speaking news websites wich share controversial content leveraging French national news;
- creating networks of inauthentic accounts, mainly on Facebook and Twitter, in order to spread the content published on the domain names registered in the context of the campaign.
On 15 December 2022, following the publication of several reports a few months earlier, by the NGO EU Disinfolab, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFLab), Meta publicly attributed the RRN campaign to two Russian companies: ASP and Struktura. Investigations conducted by VIGINUM have uncovered several elements pointing to the involvement of Russian or Russian-speaking individuals and several Russian companies in the design and conduct of this campaign. VIGINUM has also observed that several government entities or entities affiliated with the Russian Federation participated in spreading some contents.
Format
JSON, Stix 2.1
Requirements
OpenCTI, release needed: 5.9.6
Credits
Disarm Framework CC BY-SA-4 Disarm Foundation Traduction: CC BY-SA-4 SGDSN-VIGINUM
Links
Acknowledgements
We warmly thank EEAS and Filigran for their help on creating this file.