Photos of blood-red hands at a Holocaust memorial. A fake French army recruitment crusade calling for the recruitment of infantrymen in Ukraine, and major French news sites improbably registered in a hard-to-understand Pacific territory with a population of 15,000.
They are all part of disinformation campaigns orchestrated from Russia and France, according to French officials and cybersecurity experts in Europe and the United States. The French legislative elections and the Paris Olympics led them to overwork.
More than a dozen reports over the past year point to an intensified effort through Russia to harm France, at the upcoming Games, and President Emmanuel Macron, who is one of Ukraine’s biggest supporters in Europe.
Russia’s anti-French disinformation campaigns began online early last summer but first became tangible in October 2023, when more than 1,000 robots linked to Russia broadcast images of tagged Stars of David in Paris and its suburbs.
A French intelligence report says the Russian intelligence firm FSB ordered the marking, and then vandalism, of a monument dedicated to those who helped save Jews from the Holocaust.
Photos of each occasion were amplified on social media through fake accounts connected to the Russian disinformation site RRN, according to cybersecurity experts. Russia denies any such campaign. The French intelligence report said NRN is a component of a larger operation orchestrated through Sergei Kiriyenko, a senior Kremlin official.
“You have to see this as an ecosystem,” said a French army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal about the Russian effort. “It’s a hybrid strategy. “
The labels and acts of vandalism had no direct link to the Russian war in Ukraine, but they provoked a strong reaction from the French political class, with denunciations in parliament and in the public debate. Anti-Semitic attacks are taking place in France and in the Gaza Strip the war has proved divisive.
The Stars of David can be interpreted simply as pro-Israel or oppositional. The effect was to sow division and unrest. French Jews, in particular, have been unwittingly drawn into political strife, despite representing only a small proportion of French Jews. population, with only 500,000 people.
In March, just after Macron discussed the option of mobilizing the French army in Ukraine, a fake conscription crusade for the French army in Ukraine began, resulting in a series of messages on Telegram channels in Russian and French that were picked up in Russian. and Belarusian media, according to a separate French government report seen through The Associated Press. On June 1, coffins appeared in front of the Eiffel Tower, with the inscription “French infantry in Ukraine. “
Large-scale disinformation efforts have had little luck in France, but the Russian public would have possibly been the real target, officials said, making it appear that Russia’s war in Ukraine is, as Putin has said, a war with the West.
Among the broader goals, the French army officer said, was a steady, long-term effort to sow social discord, erode acceptance as true in the media and democratic governments, undermine NATO and undermine Western aid to Ukraine. The fact that most Russian athletes are excluded is a plus, according to French officials who are keeping an eye out for increasingly vehement messages warning of possible unrest ahead of the Games.
On June 9, France’s far-right National Rally defeated Macron’s party in the European Parliament elections. The party has been close to Russia: one of its leading figures, Marine Le Pen, maintained ties to Putin for many years and supported Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. And its top candidate for prime minister, Jordan Bardella, declared himself opposed sending long-range weapons to Kyiv.
Of the more than 4,400 posts collected since mid-November through antibot4navalny, a collective that analyzes the habits of Russian robots, those aimed at a French and German audience predominated. The number of weekly posts ranged from 100 to 200, with the exception of the week of May 5, when it fell to almost zero, according to the data. It just so happened that this week is a holiday in Russia.
Many messages redirect to RRN or to sites that look the same for the main French media, but with the main content (and content) modified. At least two of the most recent mirror sites are registered in Wallis and Futuna, a French territory in the Pacific 10 time zones from Paris. A click on the sensitive top of the fake page redirects to the genuine news sites themselves to give an impression of authenticity. Other messages redirect to original sites controlled by the campaign itself, dubbed Doppelganger.
The reorientations diverted attention to the European elections and continued after Macron called early parliamentary elections just three weeks from the end. Three-quarters of the messages in the week leading up to the first memo of the June 30 legislative elections pointed to a crisis in the country. The French focused on criticizing Macron or strengthening the National Rally, antibot4navalny found in information shared with The Associated Press.
A fake message purportedly from Le Point, a news magazine, and the French news agency AFP, criticizing Macron.
“Our leaders have no idea how French citizens live, but they are capable of destroying France in order to help Ukraine,” he headlined on June 25.
Another falsely claimed to be from Macron’s party, offering to pay one hundred euros to vote for him and connecting to the party’s authentic network. And yet some others inadvertently left a generative AI spark calling for the rewrite of an article “adopting a conservative stance opposed to the liberal policies of the Macron administration,” according to last week’s findings from the Insikt group , the risk studies department of Cybersecurity Consulting. Future engraved.
“They automatically scrape it, send it to the AI, and ask it to introduce bias or bias into the article and rewrite it,” said Clement Briens, an analyst at Recorded Future.
Briens said the site’s built-in measurement equipment is likely intended to demonstrate that the campaigns have been cash well spent for “whoever pays the bills for those operations. “
The French government’s cybersecurity watchdog, Viginum, has published several reports since June 2023 pointing to Russian efforts to seed apartments in France and elsewhere. It was around this time that pro-Kremlin Telegram feeds began selling “The Olympics Have Fallen,” a fake Netflix movie. with an AI-generated voice resembling Tom Cruise that criticizes the International Olympic Committee, according to Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
Microsoft said the campaign, which it called Storm-1679, stoked fears of violence at the Games and last fall posted digitally generated images that referenced, among other things, attacks on Israeli athletes at the Olympics. since 1972.
This new effort, which began just after the first election circular on June 30, combines fears of violence related to the Olympics and the threat of demonstrations after the decisive moment circular, antibot4navalny noted. Viginum released a new report Tuesday detailing looming threats to the Games, not from violence but from misinformation.
“Digital data manipulation campaigns are a real tool to destabilize democracies,” said Viginum. “This global occasion will provide untold data exposure to malevolent foreign actors. ” The word Russia does not appear anywhere.
Baptiste Robert, a French cybersecurity expert who ran unsuccessfully as an unaffiliated centrist in parliamentary elections, called on his government (and especially lawmakers) to prepare for the virtual threats ahead.
“This is a global policy of Russia: they need to take others to the extreme,” he said before the first round. “It’s working perfectly right now. “