Pierluigi Paganini February 23, 2021

Twitter removed dozens of accounts allegedly used by Russia-linked threat actors to disseminate disinformation and target western countries.

Twitter has removed dozens of accounts used by Russia-linked threat actors that were used to disseminate disinformation and to target the European Union, the United States, and the NATO alliance.

Experts believe the accounts were part of two separate clusters that were operated by Russian actors and that targeted different entities.

A first cluster composed of 69 fake accounts, part of these accounts were used to amplify narratives that were aligned with the politics of the Russian government, while a second subset was focused on undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

The second Russian-linked disinformation network was composed of 31 accounts, from two distinct networks allegedly affiliated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Russian government-linked actors. The accounts were used to amplify narratives that had been previously associated with the IRA and other Russia-linked organizations. The accounts were involved in disinformation campaigns targeting the United States and European Union.

“Our first investigation found and removed a network of 69 fake accounts that can be reliably tied to Russian state actors.” reads the post published by Twitter. “As part of our second investigation in this region, we removed 31 accounts from two networks that show signs of being affiliated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Russian government-linked actors.”

Twitter also removed other networks of accounts employed in disinformation operations conducted by nation-state actors. 100 accounts were linked to Russia, 35 to Armenia, 130 to Iran.

“Today we are disclosing four networks of accounts to our archive of state-linked information operations; the only archive of its kind in the industry. The networks we are disclosing relate to independent, state-affiliated information operations that we have attributed to Armenia, Russia and a previously disclosed network from Iran.” Twitter conclues.

“Since we launched our first archive in October 2018, we have disclosed data related to more than 85,000 accounts associated with platform manipulation campaigns originating from 20 countries, to our information operations archive.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, disinformation)

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