Russian hacktivists named Doppelgänger have been interfering in Germany’s elections with a view to influence the outcome of upcoming European elections, according to a report from SentinelLabs and ClearSky Cyber Security.
“Doppelgänger represents an active instrument of information warfare. We anticipate that Doppelgänger’s activities, targeting not only Germany but also other Western countries, will persist and evolve, particularly in light of the major elections scheduled across the EU and the USA in the coming years,” says the report.
Recent interference in German elections, also reported by Der Spiegel, is the latest development in the information war now being fought between Russia and the West. Experts at the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs have identified a systematic disinformation campaign favouring Russia on the social media platform Twitter (X) and examined a vast dataset on Twitter (X) from 20 December to 20 January. Analysts identified over 50,000 Twitter accounts not belonging to real individuals and engaged in coordinated information campaigns in the German language. On certain days, these bots generated around 200,000 tweets per day.
Deliberate attempt by Russia to swing Western elections
The scale and consistency of the attacks and the resources that underpin them suggest that the attacks are more than mere amateur hacktivists but are part of a deliberate attempt by Russia to swing upcoming Western elections to elect governments it hopes may be easier for it to manipulate to achieve its territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe.
The attacks appear to be far too well orchestrated and executed to be the work of anyone other than a nation-state such as Russia’s propaganda department. And the methods they are using are becoming increasingly sophisticated, often linking users of the social network in question to expertly doctored fake news.
“Coordinators of the campaign have repeatedly created fake primary sources to disseminate specific tweets through bots to a large audience. For instance, in September, they began spreading a screenshot of a thread supposedly from the real page of Annalena Baerbock, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany, falsely quoting her saying, ‘The war in Ukraine will end in three months.’ The thread is, in fact, a meticulous Photoshop creation,” says the German Ministry.
According to a source close to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), there are now fears that the kind of deepfake video technology currently used by cybercriminals to mimic corporate CFOs in financial frauds may now be employed for political ends. For instance, a deepfake video of a presidential candidate apparently doing and saying unforgivable things could be distributed by Russian bots across appropriate social networks the day before an election. The deepfake could easily be linked to a cloned website all but indistinguishable from that of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or any other reputable news source.
Countries having free elections this year and next should begin to educate their citizens that they must always regard anything they see on Twitter[X] with the utmost caution – particularly on an election day.
