Welcome to Memetic Warfare. This week we’ll cover a few reports but it’ll be a shorter than usual post.
The first report that I’ll refer to is Viginum’s latest report on Romania, available in what else but French and Romanian. Will Viginum ever begin publishing regularly in English? Who knows, but a part of me respects the Francocentrism.
From there, the topic du jour is the German elections. We’ve covered past reports on Russian interference in the German elections here on the blog (and I’ve published some articles at the CRC, a growing think tank in Europe on IO), but the reports keep coming.
Following Newsguard and Correctiv’s reporting on the latest iteration of CopyCop, the ISD has published a look at approximately 50 Twitter accounts that appear to be a subset of Operation Overload targeting the German elections using now legally-mandated generative AI. I don’t usually love covering small, Twitter-centric operations, but I’ll break my rule for the German elections.
Those interested in a deeper look at the German elections should check out Recorded Future’s latest report, available here. This report looks at known past Russian influence operations, such as CopyCop, Doppelganger and even the Russian Foundation to Battle Injustice. Check out key findings below:
We have some new infra for Doppelganger:
I’m also glad to see RF looking at the hosting providers and ASNs themselves:
As we’ve covered here many times, there’s a lot of work left to do at the AS level, and it’s good to see that here. Some of the hosting providers I’ve seen multiple times in the past, such as QHoster, but haven’t come across for example Ultahost.
The report covers new developments in other operations as well as stated:
I also can’t avoid the hysterical antisemitism section:
Just look at this memery:
Overall great stuff, and I didn’t even cover the CopyCop section. Check out the report yourself if interested.
We’ll conclude with an interesting piece of research from the German Marshall Fund, available here. See key findings below if you can’t be bothered to read it:
The research covers influence operations targeting individual US states, and looks to be a great resource for those interested in tracking this sort of activity. I wish that we had some sort of coded version of this for smarter use, but either way - a solid start. I’ll conclude with a humblebrag and screenshot of some work that Max Lesser and I did at the FDD which made it in. We hope to get another paper out with more details on the domains in the network soon, so stay tuned.
That’s it for this week! Check out Telemetryapp.io and I’ll see you next week.