Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said yesterday that attackers are increasingly targeting officials in the Ukrainian military, as well as politicians and media, to spread disinformation.
According to Reuters, in the last 48 hours, Meta claim to have removed a network of around 40 fake accounts, groups and pages across Facebook and Instagram , for violating its rules against coordinated inauthentic behaviour. These groups operated from Russia and Ukraine, and targeted people in Ukraine.
In addition, in a blog post earlier today, Meta named a group known as Ghostwriter as the culprit behind the hacks, and said it successfully gained access to the targets' social media accounts. The hackers attempted to post YouTube videos from these accounts, showing Ukrainian forces as weakened and surrendering to the invaders.
“We’ve also seen increased targeting of Ukrainian military and public figures by Ghostwriter, a threat actor that has been tracked for some time by the security community.”
Meta added that it encourages people in Ukraine and Russia to adopt stronger account security measures, such as two-factor authentication, to safeguard their information during the invasion.
The threats highlight the range of hurdles social media sites have to overcome as they try to fight false claims about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Meta said: “We took down a network run by people in Ukraine and Russia targeting Ukraine for violating our policy against coordinated, unauthentic behaviour.”
Meta noted hackers ran websites posing as independent news entities and created fake personas across many social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, Odnoklassniki and VK.
“We’ve established a special operations centre staffed by experts from across the company, including native Russian and Ukrainian speakers, who are monitoring the platform around the clock, allowing us to respond to issues in real-time."
Meta said it has added features in Ukraine meant to keep users safe, including the ability to lock their Facebook profile and remove the ability to view and search friend lists.
The company, following in Twitter’s footsteps, is encouraging users to enable two-factor authentication, an extra layer of security that makes it harder for attackers to break into accounts.
Also, Meta claims to have taken “extensive steps” to combat the spread of misinformation by expanding its third-party fact-checking capacity in these two countries.
“We’re also providing more transparency around state-controlled media outlets, prohibiting ads from Russian state media and demonetising their accounts.”
Meta said it has been in contact with the government of Ukraine, and at its request, has restricted access to several accounts in the country, including those belonging to several Russian state media organisations.
“We are also reviewing other government requests to restrict Russian state-controlled media,” the company added.