A Moscow-based firm sanctioned by the U.S. earlier this yr has been linked to one more affect operation designed to show public opinion in opposition to Ukraine and erode Western help since not less than December 2023.
The covert marketing campaign undertaken by Social Design Company (SDA), leverages movies enhanced utilizing synthetic intelligence (AI) and bogus web sites impersonating respected information sources to focus on audiences throughout Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S. It has been dubbed Operation Undercut by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group.
“This operation, running in tandem with other campaigns like Doppelganger, is designed to discredit Ukraine’s leadership, question the effectiveness of Western aid, and stir socio-political tensions,” the cybersecurity firm stated.
“The campaign also seeks to shape narratives around the 2024 U.S. elections and geopolitical conflicts, such as the Israel-Gaza situation, to deepen divisions.”
Social Design Company has been beforehand attributed to Doppelganger, which additionally employs social media accounts and a community of inauthentic information websites to sway public opinion. The corporate and its founders have been sanctioned by the U.S. earlier this March, alongside one other Russian firm often called Structura.
Operation Undercut shares infrastructure with each Doppelganger and Operation Overload (aka Matryoshka and Storm-1679), a Russia-aligned affect marketing campaign that has tried to undermine the 2024 French elections, the Paris Olympics, and the U.S. presidential election utilizing a mix of faux information websites, false fact-checking assets, and AI-generated audio.
The newest marketing campaign is not any totally different in that it abuses the belief customers place on trusted media manufacturers and leverages AI-powered movies and pictures mimicking media sources to lend it extra credibility. A minimum of 500 accounts spanning numerous social media platforms, corresponding to 9gag and America’s greatest pics and movies, have been used to amplify the content material.
Moreover, the operation has been discovered to make use of trending hashtags in focused nations and languages to succeed in an even bigger viewers, in addition to promote content material from CopyCop (aka Storm-1516).
“Operation Undercut is part of Russia’s broader strategy to destabilize Western alliances and portray Ukraine’s leadership as ineffective and corrupt,” Recorded Future stated. “By targeting audiences in Europe and the U.S., the SDA seeks to amplify anti-Ukraine sentiment, hoping to reduce the flow of Western military aid to Ukraine.”
APT28 Conducts Nearest Neighbor Assault
The disclosure comes because the Russia-linked APT28 (aka GruesomeLarch) risk actor has been noticed breaching a U.S. firm in early February 2022 by means of an uncommon approach referred to as the closest neighbor assault that concerned first compromising a distinct entity situated in an adjoining constructing situated inside the Wi-Fi vary of the goal.
The top objective of the assault aimed on the unnamed group, which came about simply forward of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was to gather information from people with experience on and tasks actively involving the nation.
“GruesomeLarch was able to ultimately breach [the organization’s] network by connecting to their enterprise Wi-Fi network,” Volexity stated. “The threat actor accomplished this by daisy-chaining their approach to compromise multiple organizations in close proximity to their intended target.”
The assault is alleged to have been achieved by conducting password-spray assaults in opposition to a public-facing service on the corporate’s community to acquire legitimate wi-fi credentials, and making the most of the truth that connecting to the enterprise Wi-Fi community didn’t require multi-factor authentication.
The technique, Volexity stated, was to breach the second group situated throughout the road from the goal and use it as a conduit to laterally transfer throughout its community and in the end connect with the supposed firm’s Wi-Fi community by supplying the beforehand obtained credentials, whereas being 1000’s of miles away.
“The compromise of these credentials alone did not yield access to the customer’s environment, as all internet-facing resources required use of multi-factor authentication,” Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, and Tom Lancaster stated. “However, the Wi-Fi network was not protected by MFA, meaning proximity to the target network and valid credentials were the only requirements to connect.”
