Faux-nexia
Welcome to Memetic Warfare.
We’ll start off with a recommendation. Friend of the blog Greg Davis writes on Latin American affairs at his Substack America and America - see his post on Hondurasgate below:
Greg’s post also brought to my attention two key factors on the operation. The first is that Honduran media checked out the domain itself and found that its YouTube channel was previously named “Elon Musk Noticias” and used for similar purposes: sharing unverified “conversations” between politicians.
The second component is that Phonexia denied that its tool was ever used by Hondurasgate to verify the audio, meaning that they lied about it (unsurprisingly).
If anyone had any doubts as to whether or not Honduras Gate was a legitimate journalistic venture, the two updates above should have cleared it up.
Moving on, I noticed that Chinese virtual espionage operations continue unabated:
I unfortunately couldn’t find the original email used, and there’s no domain. The Instagram account is still active, and based in China. Despite being ostensibly focused on central Asia, the account’s picture shows the borders of Afghanistan:
The posts are mostly “educational”, but some mention the existence of the company itself - Central Asia Information Consulting Company, claiming to be active in central Asia, China, Singapore and Turkey. The latest post sare from 2024, but they’re still out there cold-emailing apparently.
Beyond the attempts to recruit people, the account uploads the occasional post praising China:
This was a small but interesting and still ongoing operation. The confluence of influence and espionage is something that we see with Iran as well, and I imagine we’ll see more of this going forward from China.
Let’s conclude with a report recommendation from Domaintools Investigations on Doppelganger. Check it out here.
DTI does great work and I’m a big fan of their holistic reporting on these persistent threat actors, which gives context and findings one doesn’t get from a report looking just at one aspect, check out the diagram below as an example.
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading.