France on Tuesday accused Russia of being behind a vast operation of digital interference, in particular through the publication of false articles from major French dailies hostile to Ukraine, actions falling under Moscow’s “hybrid war”.
“The French authorities have revealed the existence of a digital information manipulation campaign against France involving Russian actors and in which state entities or entities affiliated with the Russian state have participated by amplifying false information” said Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna.
Paris is in “close ties” with its allies “to defeat the hybrid war waged by Russia”, she added.
The campaign targeted media sites, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government institutions by creating mirror sites, said ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre.
The detection on May 29 of a mirror site of the ministry claiming, wrongly, that France would introduce a tax to finance aid to Ukraine accelerated the decision of the authorities to make the affair public, according to a government source.
So far, Paris has followed a cautious doctrine when it comes to attributing digital attacks. Moreover, this French declaration “does not constitute an attribution” to the Russian authorities, only accused for the moment of having participated in the amplification of the phenomenon, specified the government source. But “we want to send a clear message that we are able to detect,” she added.
The investigations highlight “the involvement of Russian or Russian-speaking individuals and several Russian companies in the realization and conduct of the campaign”, according to a summary note from Viginum, the organization for combating foreign digital interference created in 2021, who conducted the survey.
The Minister underlined “the involvement of Russian embassies and cultural centers which have actively participated in the amplification of this campaign”.
Operation “Doppelgänger”
The operation is more precisely “the second phase of an already known campaign, but with more sophisticated modes of action”, explained to AFP a security source involved in the file.
This is Operation Doppelgänger, a folk term for a person’s evil double, already documented in 2022, in particular by the American giant Meta.
At the end of September, Facebook’s parent company announced that it had dismantled a “secret influence” operation on its platform from Russia to amplify the visibility of these articles from pirate sites, for which its promoters, two consulting companies, had spent 105,000 US dollars.
“Meta hoped that his report would put an end to the operations, this was not the case”, explains the security source.
At least four French dailies, The Parisian, Le Figaro, The world And 20 minuteswere victims of the operation, but other major media were also targeted, particularly in Germany (Der Spiegel, Picture, Die Welt…) or Italian.
Using the practice of “typosquatting”, the hackers produced fake articles on a page identical in all respects to those of the official site of these media, but with a different domain name. These fake articles are then spread through social networks trying to push their virality, which seems low at the moment.
“Industrialization process”
” The world can only condemn these intolerable actions and welcome the fact that the perpetrators of these attempts at manipulation have now been identified”, commented its director, Jérôme Fenoglio.
“We take this case very seriously and we will act resolutely to deal with this usurpation of the identity of our brand” reacted for AFP Ronan Dubois, director of the publication of 20 minutes.
“We found dozens of domain names bought by the Russians. We are not dealing with people who act in homeopathic doses. They are at the start of an industrialization process,” the security source told AFP.
The initial structure of the operation is called RRN, from the name of the pro-Russian site RRN.world (Reliable Recent News) created a few months after the start of the war in Ukraine and shared a lot of fake news.
In addition to typosquatting, the operation results in other actions of influence such as the production of anti-Zelensky cartoons or pro-Russian narratives.
“There is no doubt that the objective was to carry out a major disinformation campaign against French opinion”, according to the government source.
This operation “is part of a long-term Russian strategic thought”, explains to AFP the researcher of the Ifri Dimitri Minic, author of Russian strategic thought and culture (Editions of the House of Human Sciences).
“All this is not the delirium of a few lost people, but has been put into doctrine […] informational warfare is the concept they have studied the most for 30 years,” he told AFP. “I don’t think it’s going to be very successful, but it’s going to solidify their fan base in France and Germany, which they probably overestimate, but which really exists. »