Facebook fakers get better at covering tracks
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 US voters ahead of congressional elections in November. The company said last week it had removed 32 fake pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram involved in what it called “coordinated inauthentic behaviour.” 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 said. “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 US 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 here on last 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 organisation 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.
US 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 US intelligence officials who requested anonymity said 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.”
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. -— Reuters
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