A group of hackers known as Ghostwriter has been expelled from Facebook and Instagram. They tried to hack prominent Ukrainians and then spread disinformation. A handful of accounts were already affected. A network masquerading as media outlets has also been dismantled.
They had fake accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but also YouTube and the chat app Telegram. It was just a relatively small network of accounts, pages, and groups on Facebook and Instagram.
Parent company Meta He talks about 40 accounts that were discovered in the last two days. 4,000 people follow one or more pages of the group, and 500 people follow one or more of the hacker’s Instagram accounts. Various novels spread as a journalist based in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The network has also been behind a number of websites masquerading as independent news websites.
According to a Twitter spokesperson I spoke to New York times She was also active on those social networking accounts. The company now blocks the ability to share links from the group. “The accounts and links were in Russia and they were trying to influence the conversations about the conflict in Ukraine,” the spokesman said.
Ghostwriter . has been banned
Ghostwriter tried to hack Ukrainian military and public figures. They did this by hacking email addresses to gain access to social media accounts to spread misinformation there. For example, there was an attempt to share videos on YouTube of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering to Russia. Meta has blocked domains used for phishing attempts.
news site Daily Beast Reports say that Ghostwriter was first noticed in 2020. At the end of last year, it was linked with the Belarusian system. The hacker group had also broken into real news websites to publish articles with conspiracy theories about NATO and the coronavirus.
This is how you check if something is fake news
For years, false news has spread about political struggles, among other things, in an attempt to sway public opinion. This means that not every piece of news you see on social media is accurate and reliable, and you have to verify it yourself.
You can do this primarily by carefully researching the related news. Check with a search engine like Google if a story has been taken over by the mainstream media, or if a fact-checker has verified the story. A second trusted source can help verify if the story is true. Some articles are also validated by social media, so below the link you can see if it’s fake news.
Check if the sources already exist
Fake news often also refers to non-existent sources. Have you read about a professor who warns of a major conspiracy? Search, for example, on Google Scholar or the website of the relevant university to see if this person is real. On sites like Google Scholar You can check if the reference study already exists.
And even if that’s true, stay alert and careful. Fake news writers try to deceive you in creative ways, sometimes making it difficult to rule out fake news entirely.
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