ONLINE DISINFORMATION: Under the hood of a Doppelgänger

ONLINE DISINFORMATION is one of the defining issues of our time and the influence of fake news has become an acute threat to our society.

Disinformation undermines true journalism and steers the public opinion in highly charged topics such as immigration, climate change, armed conflicts or refugee and health crises. Social media platforms are the battlefield of disinformation.

The war in Ukraine is no exception. This investigation presents how a large disinformation campaign targeting European audience with pro-Russian propaganda was active in social media for months. What started as an investigation of media clones of the German Der Spiegel, Bild and T-Online turned out to be a fascinating dive into the multimedia world of disinformation production.

Tracing the infrastructure of a few websites helped us to discover dozens of websites spreading Russian propaganda related to the war in Ukraine. The campaign undermined the Ukrainian government, its citizens, and Western governments supporting Ukraine and supported the lift of sanctions against Russia.

Qurium’s infrastructure research does not only show how European infrastructure has been used to host the fake news sites, but also how new domains have been registered to keep the campaign running in the very same physical servers.

Qurium’s investigation is the result of a collaboration with EU DisinfoLab, an independent non-profit organization focused on tackling sophisticated disinformation campaigns targeting the EU. Qurium has focused on the technical aspects of the campaign.

Qurium forensics report:
Under the hood of a Doppelgänger

EU DisinfoLab report:
Doppelganger

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Disinformation)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.