A pro-Russian hacking group called Ghostwriter, linked to Belarus, targeted Ukrainian military officials and public figures through phishing attacks to compromise their social media accounts and post disinformation, while a separate network of about 40 fake accounts used AI-generated avatars to spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda on Meta platforms.
Meta reported detecting two separate information warfare campaigns targeting Ukraine during Russia's invasion. The first involved the hacking group Ghostwriter, which security researchers have linked to the Belarusian government, conducting phishing attacks against Ukrainian military officials, politicians, and journalists to compromise their social media accounts. Once successful, the hackers posted YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering, including videos claiming to show soldiers flying white flags of surrender. The second campaign involved approximately 40 fake accounts, pages and groups operated from Russia and Ukraine that used AI-generated profile pictures and posed as news editors, aviation engineers, and scientists. These accounts claimed to be based in Kyiv and ran fake news websites spreading narratives about the West betraying Ukraine and Ukraine being a failed state. The fake network had fewer than 4,000 Facebook followers and fewer than 500 Instagram followers when detected. Meta blocked the phishing domains, secured compromised accounts, removed the fake network, and implemented additional security protections for users in Ukraine and Russia including profile locking tools and friends list privacy controls.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
Using AI systems to conduct large-scale disinformation campaigns, malicious surveillance, or targeted and sophisticated automated censorship and propaganda, with the aim of manipulating political processes, public opinion, and behavior.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed