Meta: We continue the “battle” with the “trolls”

Miltos Sakellaris

The company Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was cited in its ongoing “battle” against trolls using fake accounts.

According to what he reported a few days ago, he removed from Instagram a group of “trolls” based in Russia, which proceeded to spread false news about the war in Ukraine.

Head of global threat intelligence Ben Nimmo noted that the group, referred to as “Cyber​​Front Z”, based in St. Petersburg, was identified by Meta in mid-March and taken down in early April. Meta’s Quarterly Report, released on Thursday, also noted that the group was linked to people who had been linked to the Internet Research Service, one of the major entities involved in Russia’s far-reaching efforts to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.

Since it was taken down, the “troll farm” has tried to come back, the report says, but the company continues to detect those attempts and disable them. Nimmo further pointed out that this particular group of trolls hired dozens of people to make what appeared to be genuine posts defending Russia and criticizing Ukraine.

“They maintained a Telegram channel that basically told people to leave pro-Russian comments on social media posts by public figures, journalists, politicians, celebrities, like Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman,” he said at a press conference on Thursday, clarifying that this particular group targets users on LinkedIn, Twitter and “many different platforms.”

In its report, Meta said the “Cyber ​​Front Z” group operated 45 Facebook accounts and 1,037 Instagram accounts. It also reported that about 49,000 accounts followed one or more of the Instagram accounts.

Beyond Russia, the report also details actions taken by Meta against the APT 36 hacker group, which operates in the Middle East. The group targeted social media users in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia using various malicious tactics to infect devices with suspicious software.

Read the News today and get the latest news. Follow Skai.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news.