Microsoft
Last yr, a feature-length documentary purportedly produced by Netflix started circulating on Telegram. Titled “Olympics have Fallen” and narrated by a voice with a putting similarity to that of actor Tom Cruise, it sharply criticized the management of the International Olympic Committee. The slickly produced movie, claiming five-star opinions from the New York Times, Washington Post, and BBC, was rapidly amplified on social media. Among these seemingly endorsing the documentary had been celebrities on the platform Cameo.
A just lately printed report by Microsoft (PDF) stated the movie was not a documentary, had acquired no such opinions, and that the narrator’s voice was an AI-produced deep faux of Cruise. It additionally stated the endorsements on Cameo had been faked. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Report went on to say that the fraudulent documentary and endorsements had been solely one among many elaborate hoaxes created by agents of the Russian authorities in a year-long affect operation meant to discredit the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and deter participation and attendance on the Paris Olympics beginning subsequent month.
Other examples of the Kremlin’s ongoing affect operation embrace:
- A video purporting to be from Brussels-based media outlet Euro News claimed Parisians had been shopping for property insurance coverage in anticipation of terrorism on the Games.
- A faux video pretending to come from French broadcaster France24 claimed that 24 % of tickets for the video games had been returned due to fears of terrorism.
- Fake video press releases had been produced posing as coming from the CIA and the French General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) warning potential attendees to steer clear of the Paris 2024 Olympics due to the alleged danger of a terror assault.
- An array of 15 distinctive French-language “information” websites, together with a core disinformation outlet named Reliable Recent News (RRN) that made claims of rampant IOC corruption and warned of potential violence on the Games. The websites try to impersonate French shops Le Parisien and Le Point to amplify the claims and castigate French President Emmanuel Macron and his authorities.
Members of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center—a group that tracks hacking and affect campaigns of nation-state actors—have attributed a lot of the exercise to two distinct teams tracked beneath the names Storm-1679 and Storm-1099. Both teams have spent years sowing Kremlin speaking factors in Western media.
“Starting in June 2023, prolific Russian affect actors—which Microsoft tracks as Storm-1679 and Storm-1099—pivoted their operations to take goal on the 2024 Olympic Games and French President Emmanuel Macron,” MTAC members wrote. “These ongoing Russian affect operations have two central targets: to denigrate the status of the IOC on the world stage; and to create the expectation of violence breaking out in Paris in the course of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.”
