https://therecord.media/russia-botnet-fronton-social-media-nisos/

Russian government procured powerful botnet to shift social media trending topics

in 2017 and 2018, the Russian government was interested in building a large IoT botnet similar to Mirai. The specs laid out a plan to create a botnet out of a web of compromised internet security cameras and digital recorders.

But in the documents obtained by Nisos, the researchers say the “primary purpose” of Fronton “is not to create Denial of Service attacks, but to lay groundwork for massively scalable coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The botnet “consists of a layer of compromised IoT devices that communicate with front-end server infrastructure. These servers then pass their data over VPNs or the TOR network to back-end servers,” Nisos explained. “While the system could not exist without this groundwork, it is not the focal point of the Fronton network. This base layer is then utilized by the SANA platform in order to coordinate inauthentic behavior and propagate disinformation at a global scale.”

Management of likes, comments and reposts
The tool allowed users to program the weekly frequency of likes, comments, and reposts while also providing a list of response patterns that could be used.

Users could even set the minimum frequency of actions and well as the intervals between actions. 0day Technologies created a machine learning system that could be turned on and off related to behavioral trends on social media.

“Groups are auto-generated sets of accounts created by the system that are organized by platform and country,” Nisos explained.

“The operator can choose from a list of names and a dictionary of surnames. The operator can then select the SMS API platform to use in order to create a phone number to automatically respond to two-factor authentication requests and other platform text requests.”

In recent years, several social media companies have begun releasing reports on inauthentic behavior, highlighting the global prevalence of fake accounts used for a range of political purposes.

Last month, Facebook parent company Meta released an Adversarial Threat Report that found a network based in Saint Petersburg, Russia that targeted Nigeria, Cameroon, Gambia, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with news critical of France’s influence across the African continent.

Meta said it was able to tie the activity to the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency, an organization well-known for its role in interfering in the US presidential election in 2016.

The Meta report also highlighted a range of bot activity, espionage and coordinated attacks on Facebook and Instagram in a number of countries, including Azerbaijan, Brazil, Costa Rica, the Philippines, El Salvador and Iran.

I see you got pictures of an old HunFarm event.

How close to a parked one would you want to be?  

Grinning like a cat with a mouth full of briars.