ChestyBot: Detecting and Disrupting Chinese Communist Party Influence Stratagems

Foreign information operations conducted by Russian and Chinese actors exploit the United States' permissive information environment. These campaigns threaten democratic institutions and the broader Westphalian model. Yet, existing detection and mitigation strategies often fail to identify active...

Iran and Hezbollah Hackers Launch Attacks to Influence Israel-Hamas Narrative

Hackers backed by Iran and Hezbollah staged cyber attacks designed to undercut public support for the Israel-Hamas war after October 2023. This includes destructive attacks against key Israeli organizations, hack-and-leak operations targeting entities in Israel and the U.S., phishing campaigns...

Microsoft shares threat intelligence at CYBERWARCON 2023

At the CYBERWARCON 2023 conference, Microsoft and LinkedIn analysts are presenting several sessions detailing analysis across multiple sets of threat actors and related activity. This blog is intended to summarize the content of the research covered in these presentations and demonstrates Microso...

Microsoft shares threat intelligence at CYBERWARCON 2023

At the CYBERWARCON 2023 conference, Microsoft and LinkedIn analysts are presenting several sessions detailing analysis across multiple sets of threat actors and related activity. This blog is intended to summarize the content of the research covered in these presentations and demonstrates Microso...

Google Reveals Alarming Surge in Russian Cyber Attacks Against Ukraine

Russia's cyber attacks against Ukraine surged by 250% in 2022 when compared to two years ago, Google's Threat Analysis Group TAG and Mandiant disclosed in a new joint report. The targeting, which coincided and has since persisted following the country's military invasion of Ukraine in February...

Meta Takes Down Fake Facebook and Instagram Accounts Linked to Pro-U.S. Influence Operation

Meta Platforms on Tuesday said it took down a network of accounts and pages across Facebook and Instagram that were operated by people associated with the U.S. military to spread narratives that depicted the country in a favorable light in the Middle East and Central Asia. The network, which...

Ghostwriter Update: Cyber Espionage Group UNC1151 Likely Conducts Ghostwriter Influence Activity

In July 2020, Mandiant Threat Intelligence released a public report detailing an ongoing influence campaign we named “Ghostwriter.” Ghostwriter is a cyber-enabled influence campaign which primarily targets audiences in Lithuania, Latvia and Poland and promotes narratives critical of the North...

Black Hat 2020: Open-Source AI to Spur Wave of 'Synthetic Media' Attacks

An abundance of deep-learning and open-source technologies are making it easy for cybercriminals to generate fake images, text and audio called “synthetic media”. This type of media can be easily leveraged on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to launch disinformation campaigns wi...

Repurposing Neural Networks to Generate Synthetic Media for Information Operations

FireEye’s Data Science and Information Operations Analysis teams released this blog post to coincide with our Black Hat USA 2020 Briefing, which details how open source, pre-trained neural networks can be leveraged to generate synthetic media for malicious purposes. To summarize our presentation,...

Twitter Disrupts Wide-Ranging Political Disinformation Campaigns

Twitter has taken down three separate nation-sponsored influence operations, attributed to the People’s Republic of China PRC, Russia and Turkey. Collectively the operations consisted of 32,242 bogus or bot accounts generating the content and various amplifier accounts that retweeted it. “Every...

"Distinguished Impersonator" Information Operation That Previously Impersonated U.S. Politicians and Journalists on Social Media Leverages Fabricated U.S. Liberal Personas to Promote Iranian Interests

In May 2019, FireEye Threat Intelligence published a blog post exposing a network of English-language social media accounts that engaged in inauthentic behavior and misrepresentation that we assessed with low confidence was organized in support of Iranian political interests. Personas in that...

Attention is All They Need: Combatting Social Media Information Operations With Neural Language Models

Information operations have flourished on social media in part because they can be conducted cheaply, are relatively low risk, have immediate global reach, and can exploit the type of viral amplification incentivized by platforms. Using networks of coordinated accounts, social media-driven...

Information operations on Twitter: new data released on election tampering

Back in April, we talked about the wealth of options available to Russian hackers and others launching social engineering campaigns, whether on social networks or through clever attacks launched via Advanced Persistent Threats. Some of that was information published by Twitter at the time in...

Twenty Years of Network Security Monitoring: From the AFCERT to Corelight

I am really fired up to join Corelight. I’ve had to keep my involvement with the team a secret since officially starting on July 20th. Why was I so excited about this company? Let me step backwards to help explain my present situation, and forecast the future. Twenty years ago this month I joined...

Facebook's Observations on Information Operations and the 2016 US Election

Facebook published paper on the information operations it has seen, as well as some observations regarding the recent US election. It's interesting reading...

New Report Beckons 'Cyber Arms Race,' Explains Black Hole Kit

Espionage has gone digital and we’re just now seeing the beginnings of what will prove to be a “cyber arms race,” according to Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer for the F-Secure, the Finnish security firm. Hypponen laid out his thoughts and recapped the last seven months in threats in the...