With its athletes barred from competing in the Summer Olympics under the national flag, Russia has turned its fury on the Games and this year’s host, Paris.
Russian propagandists created an hour-long documentary, falsified news reports and even impersonated French and American intelligence agencies to issue false warnings urging people to avoid the Games, according to a report released Sunday by Microsoft.
The report details the disinformation campaign created by a group the company calls Storm-1679. The campaign appears to have accelerated since March, flooding social media with short videos raising alarms about possible terrorist attacks and stoking fears about security.
The operation, although aimed at the Games, uses various techniques to spread disinformation that could also be used in the European and American elections.
American and French officials followed the campaign. A US official said Russian disinformation, spread by the Kremlin via social media, continued to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.
The group has also tried to get fact-checkers to look into its claims, hoping to use that attention to spread misinformation to new audiences as it is exposed.
For months, French officials have focused on how Russia could seek to undermine the Games. Hackers affiliated with Russian intelligence services disrupted the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, and French authorities are bracing for more cyberattacks this year.
France raised its terror alert level after an Islamic State attack in Moscow in March and threats against high-profile soccer matches in Paris. France has also beefed up security for the Olympics. Neither French nor American officials are warning people against participating in the Games, but Russia’s disinformation campaign aims to scare people into doing so.
Microsoft researchers and U.S. government officials have identified a number of Kremlin-affiliated groups that spread disinformation against Europe and the United States.
Some are led by aides to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. Others are affiliated with Russian intelligence. Some hide behind fake nonprofit groups. Others are veterans of the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg troll farm that spread election propaganda in 2016. The agency was led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of a mercenary group that led a rebellion against the Kremlin and was later killed on a plane. crash last year.
Storm 1679 appears distinct from these efforts, according to Microsoft. The group’s disinformation aligns with Kremlin propaganda, but few details are known about it.
Bellingcat, a research group that uses publicly available data to conduct open source investigations, was targeted with disinformation videos and observed the campaign unfold. Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, says his group has not established whether Storm 1679 is supported by the Russian government or is independent.
“It could be Prigozhin 2.0 who works for the Kremlin, or an overly imaginative pro-Russian blogger who does it for fun; we just don’t know at this stage,” Mr Higgins said.
The work began in earnest last summer with the release of a mockumentary about the International Olympic Committee, expropriating the Netflix logo and using an AI-powered voice impersonating Tom Cruise. The committee successfully had the video – a parody of the 2013 film “Olympus Has Fallen” – removed from YouTube. The attacks continued, however, with persistent efforts to discredit its leaders, the committee said in March, citing a campaign using fake recordings of what purported to be phone calls from African Union officials on behalf of Russia .
The group known as Storm-1679 now appears to be making videos that are shorter and easier to create. Previously, the focus had been on denigrating Ukrainian refugees in the West, but after French President Emmanuel Macron began publicly considering sending French troops to Ukraine, the focus shifted to the Olympics.
Microsoft estimates that Storm-1679 produces three to eight fake videos per week, in English and French, many of which impersonate the BBC, Al Jazeera and other channels. The group appears to respond quickly to current events, such as protests in New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. Others focus on the prospect of a terrorist attack in Paris.
Most videos claiming to come from the CIA and French intelligence are relatively simple. They don’t look like anything the CIA has actually produced, but to unsuspecting online readers they might appear legitimate, using the agency’s logo and stark white-on-black typography.
“They’re trying to cultivate an anticipation of violence,” Clint Watts, director of Microsoft’s Digital Threat Analysis Center, said of the group behind the fake messages. “They want people to be afraid of going to the Olympics. »
A CIA spokesperson said a video posted online in February purporting to be an agency warning warning of terrorist attacks during the Games was a fabrication.
In February, Viginum, the French government agency that fights online disinformation, identified the fake CIA video as part of a campaign called Matryoshka, named after the nesting dolls popular in Russia.
The campaign was also behind fake videos about the French intelligence agency, the French government. A person briefed on the French investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments, said Viginum and the French Foreign Ministry were quickly identifying Russian disinformation coming from the group aimed at undermining Olympic Games.
French officials and Microsoft say one of the group’s tactics appears to be trying to attract the attention of fact-checking organizations.
“Normally, when Storm-1679 posts content to Telegram, it circulates there for a day or two and then disappears,” Watts said. “Content doesn’t normally flow from one platform to another, but when their fake content is fact-checked by highly followed accounts, the content gets many more views and is introduced to new and different audiences.”
Mr. Higgins said that while harassing fact-checkers was part of the group’s strategy, it did not appear to be effective. Bellingcat, he said, is aware that reporting on misinformation can draw attention to propaganda, and that is taken into account when his organization fact-checks videos.
“It doesn’t seem like their messages are being amplified,” Mr. Higgins said. “Even among the usual circles that indulge in Russian disinformation, we don’t see it being shared at all.”