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Kim's avatar

And … surprise, surprise. Looks like Founder 1? Founder 2? was a contributor to RT.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/lauren-chen/

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Irene Kenyon's avatar

Yep. They both worked for RT

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Francis Turner's avatar

The domain typosquatting stuff was, IMHO, a lot of work for limited results. You can't get a fake story go viral from such a source because people will notice and when they do that ends up discrediting the whole site.

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Francis Turner's avatar

It only works if no one checks the link. As soon as someone sees that it is washingtonpost[.]pm not .com, say, they know the link is fake and they can spread that out too. And that sort of thing gets the weaponized autists of 4chan interested and in a couple of hours the entire construct will be exposed. As it happens though from using some tools I have it looks like the whole thing was a complete fail because the number of DNS lookups to those sites are in the dozens to low hundreds which means hardly anyone clicked on the link to see more. Total of under 6000 on the whole campaign which is pathetic

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Irene Kenyon's avatar

You’d be surprised how many smart, informed people I know who fell for that crap. And the more people share it, the more chance there is of a legit domain picking it up.

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Mike Massa's avatar

Have there been comparable investigations focused on the pacing threat in the Pacific?

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Irene Kenyon's avatar

There were charges against 40 Chinese police by DOJ. I’m not privy to active investigations, but the recent arrest of that Hochul aide and the recent reporting about Chinese disinformation efforts should give us a clue.

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Francis Turner's avatar

There is definitely awareness of west Taiwanese influence attempts. I was at a law enforcement /cyber security conference last week.

It was noted how traffic in certain places picked up at 8am Beijing time on weekdays.

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