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Ben Nimmo Profile picture
@benimmo
Oct 7, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
A small sidelight on Putin's birthday: a Russian group called Agitpolk launched the hashtag #HappyBirthdayMrPresident, perhaps hoping to catch the eyes of Western media.

The hashtag only got about 3.1k mentions on Twitter, though. Image
It's not the first time they've done this: they did the same thing in Russian in 2017.

Agitpolk said the shift to English was because Putin is a global figure, and anyone can congratulate him. All 100 most-retweeted posts were in Russian, though. Image
It's not the first time they've done this: they did the same thing in Russian in 2017.

Agitpolk said the shift to English was because Putin is a global figure, and anyone can congratulate him. All 100 most-retweeted posts were in Russian, though. Image
The interesting thing about Agitpolk? Its original Twitter handle was @AgitPolk, and its main "personality" account was @komradzampolit.

They both featured on Twitter's original list of accounts run by the Russian troll farm.

vox.com/2017/11/2/1659…

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More from @benimmo

Ben Nimmo Profile picture
Sep 27, 2022
🚨BREAKING🚨
@Meta took down two covert influence ops:
Big one from Russia🇷🇺 targeting Europe with spoofed media websites like the Guardian and Spiegel
First one from China 🇨🇳 to focus on both sides of domestic US 🇺🇸 politics and Czech-China relations.
about.fb.com/news/2022/09/r…
@Meta The operations were very different, but both worked on multiple social media platforms and petitions sites.
The Russian op was even on LiveJournal (cute).
List of domains, petitions etc in the report. #OSINT community, happy hunting!
@Meta China: this was the first Chinese network we’ve disrupted that focused on US domestic politics ahead of the midterms and Czech foreign policy toward China and Ukraine.
It was small, we took it down before it built an audience, but that’s a new direction for Chinese IO.
Read 11 tweets
Ben Nimmo Profile picture
Aug 4, 2022
🚨JUST OUT🚨
Quarterly threat report from @Meta’s investigative teams.
Takedowns from around the world:
Cyber espionage in South Asia;
Harassment in India;
Violating networks in Greece, South Africa, India;
Influence ops from Malaysia & Israel
AND...
about.fb.com/news/2022/08/m…
A deep dive into a Russian troll farm, linked to people with ties to what’s known as the Internet Research Agency.
It used fake accounts across the internet to make it look like there’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine - and to pretend the troll farm's doing a good job.
The operation called itself “Cyber Front Z”.

We think of it as the Z Team, because it was about as far from being the A Team as you can get.
Read 11 tweets
Ben Nimmo Profile picture
Apr 7, 2022
🚨JUST OUT🚨
Quarterly threat report from @Meta’s investigative teams.
Much to dig into:
State & non-state actors targeting Ukraine;
Cyber espionage from Iran and Azerbaijan;
Influence ops in Brazil and Costa Rica;
Spammy activity in the Philippines...
about.fb.com/news/2022/04/m…
I’ll focus this thread on Ukraine. For more on the rest, see the great @ngleicher and @DavidAgranovich.
We’ve seen state & non-state ops targeting Ukraine across the internet since the invasion, including attempts from:

🇧🇾 Belarus KGB
👹 A Russian “NGO” w/ some links to past IRA folks
👻 Ghostwriter

We caught these early, before they could build audience or be effective.
Read 15 tweets
Ben Nimmo Profile picture
Feb 28, 2022
🚨 TAKEDOWN 🚨
This weekend, we took down a relatively small influence operation that had targeted Ukraine across multiple social media platforms and websites. It was run by people in Russia and Ukraine: about.fb.com/news/2022/02/s…
It consisted of approx 40 accounts, Groups and Pages on FB and IG, plus on Twitter, YouTube, VK, OK, Telegram.

It mainly posted links to long-form articles on its websites, without much luck making them engaging. It got very few reactions, and under 4k followers.
It ran a few fake personas posing as authors. They had fake profile pics (likely GAN), and unusually detailed public bios - e.g. former civil aviation engineer, hydrography expert.

The op posted their articles on its websites and social media, & amplified them using more fakes.
Read 6 tweets
Ben Nimmo Profile picture
Feb 27, 2022
Personal 🧵 based on years of OSINT research into influence operations since 2014.

Looking at the Russian official messaging on “de-nazification” and “genocide”, it’s worth putting them in context of the many different Russian IO that targeted Ukraine over the years.
Way back in 2014, Russian military intel ran a series of fake “hacktivist” personas that targeted Ukraine. Note the “Nazi” theme.

Screenshots from @Graphika_NYC research, based on Facebook takedown.
about.fb.com/news/2020/09/r…
public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphi… Image
Still in 2014, one of the busiest days the Internet Research Agency had on Twitter was when it falsely accused Ukraine of shooting down flight MH-17 as a “provocation”.
Screenshot from @DFRLab /Twitter archives.
transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/inf…
medium.com/dfrlab/trolltr… Image
Read 10 tweets
Ben Nimmo Profile picture
Jan 20, 2022
JUST OUT: Report on coordinated inauthentic behaviour takedowns in December, and a look back over the past year & more.

Interesting: 2/3 of all ops we removed since 2017 were wholly or partially focused on domestic audiences.

about.fb.com/news/2022/01/d… Image
We took down three operations last month:

* Iran, targeting the UK, focusing on Scottish independence;
* Mexico, a PR firm targeting audiences across LATAM;
* Turkey, targeting Libya, and linked to the Libyan Justice and Construction Party (affiliated w/Muslim Brotherhood).
It’s not the first time for an Iranian op to pose as supporters of Scottish independence.
In the past, FB found a page that copied and posted political cartoons about independence as far back as 2013.
@Graphika_NYC writeup here (pages 26-27)
graphika.com/reports/irans-…
Read 11 tweets

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