With its athletes banned from the Summer Olympics under the country’s flag, Russia has been furious with the Olympics and this year’s host, Paris.
Russian propagandists have created an hour-long documentary, fake 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 on Sunday by Microsoft.
The report details a disinformation campaign created by a group called Storm-1679. The campaign seems to have gained momentum since March, flooding social media with short videos raising the alarm about possible terrorist attacks and fueling fears about security.
The operation, while targeting the Games, used various techniques to spread disinformation that could also be used in the European and US elections.
American and French officials have been tracking the campaign. One American official said that Russian disinformation, spread by the Kremlin through social media, continues to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.
The group is also trying to recruit fact-checkers to check its claims, hoping to use the attention to spread disinformation to new audiences as it calls it.
For months, French officials have focused on how Russia might try to sabotage the Games. Hackers with ties to Russian intelligence disrupted the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, and French officials are preparing for cyber attacks this year.
France raised its terrorism alert level after the Islamic State attack in Moscow in March and the threat to a high-profile football match in Paris. France also increased security for the Olympics. No French or American officials have warned people to stay away from the Games, but the Russian disinformation campaign is designed to scare people into doing just that.
Researchers at Microsoft and US government officials have identified several groups linked to the Kremlin that are spreading disinformation aimed at Europe and the United States.
Some were directed by aides to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Others are affiliated with Russian intelligence. Some hide fake non-profit groups. Another is a veteran of the Internet Research Agency, a St. Louis troll farm. Petersburg that distributed election propaganda in 2016. The agency was headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of a mercenary group that led a rebellion against the Kremlin and was later killed in an airplane. accident last year.
Storm-1679 appears to be separate from that effort, according to Microsoft. The group’s disinformation is in line with Kremlin propaganda, but few specifics about it are known.
Bellingcat, a research group that uses publicly available data to conduct open source investigations, has been the target of disinformation videos and has watched the campaign. Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, said that his group has not determined whether Storm-1679 is supported by the Russian government or is independent.
“It could be that Prigozhin 2.0 is doing work for the Kremlin, or an imaginative pro-Russian blogger who is doing it for kicks; we just don’t know at the moment,” Mr Higgins said.
The work began in earnest last summer by releasing a fake documentary about the International Olympic Committee, hijacking the Netflix logo and using an AI-powered voice imitating Tom Cruise. The committee managed to have the video – a spoof of the 2013 film “Olympus Has Fallen” – removed from YouTube. The attacks continued, however, in an ongoing effort to discredit his leadership, the committee said in March, citing a campaign that used fake recordings of what it said were phone calls by African Union officials on behalf of Russia.
A group known as Storm-1679 now appears to be making shorter videos that are easier to make. The focus used to be on disparaging Ukrainian refugees in the West, but after President Emmanuel Macron of France began publicly considering sending French troops to Ukraine, they shifted to the Olympics.
Microsoft estimates that Storm-1679 produces three to eight fake videos a week, in English and French, with many imitating the BBC, Al Jazeera and other broadcasters. The group appears to be quick to respond to news events, such as protests in New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. Others focused on the prospect of terrorist attacks in Paris.
Most videos pretending to be from the CIA and French intelligence are relatively simple. They don’t look like anything the CIA has produced, but to unsuspecting readers online, they may look legitimate, using the agency’s logo and black-and-white typography.
“They’re trying to develop an anticipation of violence,” Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Digital Threat Analysis Center, said of the group behind the fake posts. “They want people to be scared of going to the Olympics.”
A CIA spokesman said a video circulated online in February of the agency’s warning of a terrorist attack during the Games was a hoax.
In February, Viginum, a French government agency that fights disinformation online, identified a fake CIA video as part of a campaign called Matryoshka, after the nesting dolls popular in Russia.
The campaign is also responsible for fake videos about the domestic 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 quickly identified Russian disinformation from the group to undermine the Olympics.
French and Microsoft officials said one of the group’s tactics appears to be trying to get the attention of fact-checking organizations.
“Usually, when Storm-1679 posts content on Telegram, it circulates there for a day or two and then goes away,” Mr. Watts said. “The content doesn’t usually travel from one platform to another, but when the fake content is verified in real time by an account with a large number of followers, the content gets more views and in front of a new and different audience.”
Mr. Higgins said that baiting fact-checkers as part of the group’s strategy does not appear to be effective. Bellingcat, he said, knew that reporting on disinformation could draw attention to the propaganda, and that was taken into account when his organization reviewed the video.
“It doesn’t appear that the messages are increasing,” Mr Higgins said. “Even among the general public who use Russian disinformation, we can’t see it being shared.”
