Meta said it also removed about 40 fake Facebook and Instagram accounts, groups, and pages operating in Russia and Ukraine and targeting people in Ukraine over the weekend for violating the rules against inauthentic coordinated behavior.

In turn, a Twitter spokesperson announced the suspension of several accounts and the prohibition of sharing several links for violating the rules against manipulation of the platform and spam. He added that the ongoing investigation indicates that the accounts are coming from Russia and trying to disrupt public talk about the conflict in Ukraine.

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In a blog post on Monday, Meta attributed the hacking attempts to a group known as Ghostwriter, which gained access to its victims’ social media accounts. Meta said the hackers had tried to post videos on YouTube accounts of Ukrainian forces that are vulnerable, including a video allegedly showing Ukrainian soldiers coming out of the forest and raising the white flag of surrender.

Ukrainian cybersecurity officials said on Friday that hackers in neighboring Belarus targeted the private email addresses of Ukrainian military personnel “and people associated with them”, blaming the group codenamed “UNC1151”. The US company FireEye, which deals with cyber security, linked this group to the activities of Ghostwriter.

The Meta security team announced that it has taken steps to secure the targeted accounts and block phishing domains used by hackers. Meta refused to name the targeted accounts.

Meta claims that a separate influence campaign involved a number of fake people pretending to be based in Kyiv and operated a small number of websites pretending to be independent news sites. These parties published statements about the West’s betrayal of Ukraine and the fact that Ukraine was a failed state.

The company said it had found links between this influence network and the operation it removed in April 2020, which linked it to people in Russia and the Donbass region of Ukraine, and two Crimean-based media outlets – NewsFront and SouthFront, which are now sanctioned by the US government. Neither Newsfront nor South Front responded to a Reuters request for comment.

Meta reported that fewer than 4,000 Facebook accounts followed one or more of its pages, and fewer than 500 accounts followed one or more of its Instagram accounts. He did not say when the campaigns were active on their platforms. The campaign also used Alphabet (Google), YouTube, Telegram and the Russian social networks Odnoklassniki and VK.

In connection with the crisis in Ukraine, clashes have intensified between Moscow and the largest technology companies. Russia announced on Friday that it would partially restrict access to Facebook, which Meta said came after it rejected a government request to halt an independent fact-checking by several Russian state media outlets. Twitter also announced, Saturday, that its service is limited to some Russian users.

Meta, which has made changes in recent days such as removing the ability to view and search friends lists from Facebook accounts in Ukraine, today announced that it is also introducing this change in Russia in response to public reports that attacks are targeting civil society and protesters. .

Source: Reuters