Facebook fakers get better at covering tracks, security experts say
Facebook fakers get better at covering tracks, security
experts say
By Christopher Bing ReutersAugust 3, 2018
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Creators of fake accounts and news
pages on Facebook are learning from their past mistakes and making themselves
harder to track and identify, posing new challenges in preventing the platform
from being used for political misinformation, cyber security experts say.
This was apparent as Facebook tried to determine who
created pages it said were aimed at sowing dissension among U.S. voters ahead
of congressional elections in November. The company said on Tuesday it had
removed 32 fake pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram involved in what
it called “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
While the United States improves its efforts to monitor
and root out such intrusions, the intruders keep getting better at it, said
cyber security experts interviewed over the past two days.
Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Washington-based
Digital Forensic Research Lab, said he had noticed the latest pages used less
original language, rather cribbing from copy already on the internet.
"Linguistic mistakes would give them away before,
between 2014 and 2017," Nimmo told Reuters. "In some of these newer
cases it seems they’ve caught on to that by writing less (original material)
when posting things. With their longer posts sometimes it’s just pirated, copy
and pasted from some American website. That makes them less suspicious.”
Facebook’s prior announcement on the topic of fake
accounts, in April, directly connected a Russian group known as the Internet
Research Agency to a myriad of posts, events and propaganda that were placed on
Facebook leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
This time, Facebook did not identify the source of the
misinformation.
“It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to
much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based
Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past,” the company said in a blog
post https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/07/removing-bad-actors-on-facebook
on Tuesday announcing the removal of the pages. “Our technical forensics are
insufficient to provide high confidence attribution at this time.”
Facebook said it had shared evidence connected to the
latest flagged posts with several private sector partners, including the
Digital Forensic Research Lab, an organization founded by the Atlantic Council,
a Washington think tank.
Facebook also said the use of virtual private networks,
internet phone services, and domestic currency to pay for advertisements helped
obfuscate the source of the accounts and pages. The perpetrators also used a
third party, which Facebook declined to name, to post content.
Facebook declined to comment further, referring back to
its blog post.
U.S. President Donald Trump's top national security aides
said on Thursday that Russia is behind "pervasive" attempts to
interfere in November's elections and that they expect attempts by Russia, and
others, will continue into the 2020 elections.
They say they are concerned that attempts will be made to
foment confusion and anger among various political groups in the United States
and cause a distrust of the electoral process.
Two U.S. intelligence officials who requested anonymity
told Reuters this week there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Russia
was behind the latest Facebook campaign. However, one said “the similarities,
aims and methodology relative to the 2016 Russian campaign are quite striking.”
'PREVIOUS MISTAKES'
Experts who track online disinformation campaigns said
the groups who launch such efforts have changed how they post content and
create posts.
"These actors are learning from previous
mistakes," said John Kelly, chief executive of social media intelligence
firm Graphika, adding they do not use the same internet addresses or pay in
foreign currency.
"And as more players in the world learn these dark
arts, it’s easier for them to hide among the multiple actors deploying the same
playbook,” he said.
Philip Howard, an Oxford University professor of internet
studies and director of the Oxford Internet Institute, said that suspicious
social media accounts like those taken down this week were once more easily
identifiable because they shared the same information from high-profile
publications like RT, the Russian English-language news service, or Breitbart
News Network.
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