Ukraine Invasion: Hackers Target Ukrainian Military Personnel, Politicians Via Facebook

In the wake of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, a hacking group has attempted to hack into the Facebook, Instagram and other social media accounts of prominent Ukrainian military officials, politicians, as well as journalists.

Meta, the parent organization of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp disclosed that it has, in the last 48 hours, separately removed a network of about 40 fake accounts, groups and pages across Facebook and Instagram that operated from Russia and Ukraine, targeting people in Ukraine, for violating its rules against coordinated inauthentic behavior.

Investors King reports that this is coming, following the invasion of the country by Russia. Recall that Russia, last week Thursday, launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, one of its neighbours to the southwest. Early reports declared that this is the largest conventional warfare operation in Europe since World War II. The invasion marks a major escalation between the countries that had been in a state of conflict since 2014.

Speaking on the attempted hack, a Twitter spokesperson told Reuters that it had also suspended more than a dozen accounts and blocked the sharing of several links for violating its rules against platform manipulation and spam. According to the spokesperson, ongoing investigation revealed that the accounts originated in Russia and were attempting to disrupt the public conversation around the conflict in Ukraine.

Also, Meta, in a blog post on Monday, attributed the hacking efforts to a group known as Ghostwriter, which it said successfully gained access to the targets’ social media accounts.

Meta’s director of threat disruption, David Agranovich said: “We detected attempts to target people on Facebook and post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including a video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers surrendering”.

Meanwhile, Russia’s media regulator had earlier moved to restrict access to Facebook, as well as official accounts” of four Russian media outlets that are state-owned or state-affiliated.

Investors King had reported that these media outlets are: Zvezda TV channel, RIA Novosti news agency, Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru.

The country’s regulator, Roskomnadzor, in a statement, said its actions followed an agreement by the Prosecutor General’s Office and Ministry of Foreign Affairs “to recognize the social network Facebook as involved in the violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms, as well as the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens.”