France accused Russia on Tuesday of being behind a large-scale digital hacking operation that includes the publication of fake articles hostile to Ukraine in major French newspapers, a move that is part of Moscow’s “hybrid warfare,” AFP reported.

“French authorities have discovered the existence of a digital information manipulation campaign against France involving Russian actors, and involving government agencies or organizations affiliated with the Russian state through the dissemination of false information,” Foreign Affairs Minister Catherine Colonna said in a statement. which was read by the spokeswoman of the ministry.

Paris is in “close contact” with its allies “to put an end to the hybrid war unleashed by Russia,” she added.

According to spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre, the campaign targeted several media sites, as well as Foreign Office and other government sites, creating mirror sites.

According to a government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the May 29 discovery of a ministry mirror website falsely claiming that France was about to introduce a tax to fund aid to Ukraine precipitated the authorities’ decision to go public.

So far, Paris has followed a cautious doctrine in attributing digital attacks.

In addition, this French communique “is not a postscript” to the Russian authorities, which at the moment are only accused of participating in the strengthening of the phenomenon, the source in the government added. But “we want to send a clear message that we are capable of detection and countermeasures,” she added.

Operation Doppelgänger

The minister highlighted “the involvement of Russian embassies and cultural centers, which played an active role in strengthening this campaign, especially through their institutional accounts in social networks.”

But so far, authorities have seen “no impact on public opinion, which is quite reluctant to these campaigns,” according to Anne-Claire Legendre.

The operation disclosed by the government is more precisely “the second phase of an already known campaign, but with more sophisticated methods of operation designed to circumvent countermeasures and be less visible,” a security source involved in the case told AFP.

We are talking about the Doppelgänger operation (in the folklore of some European countries, a Doppelgänger is an evil double of a person), already documented in 2022 by the American giant Meta.

In late September, Facebook’s parent company announced it had ended a “covert influence” operation on its platform that originated in Russia to increase the visibility of such articles on pirate sites, which its promoters, two marketing and IT consulting firms, spent $105,000 on .

“Meta hoped that his report would put an end to these operations, but that did not happen,” explains a security source.

How Russian propaganda works

At least four major French newspapers – Le Parisien, Le Figaro, Le Monde and 20 minutes – were victims of the operation, but other major media institutions were also targeted, especially German ones (Der Spiegel, Bild, Die Welt, etc.). and Italian

Hackers produced fake articles on a page that is identical in all respects to the official site of these media, but with a different domain name, such as .ltd instead of .fr.

The copy is such that clicking on the hypertext links it contains leads to the actual newspaper articles. This practice is known as “typosquatting”.

These fake articles are then spread through social media in an attempt to increase their virality, which appears to be low at the moment.

“Le Monde can only condemn these intolerable actions and rejoice that the authors of these attempted manipulations have been identified,” its director Jerome Fenoglio commented on the newspaper’s website.

“We found dozens of domain names bought by Russians for printing binding. We are not dealing with people acting in non-toxic doses. They are at the beginning of the industrialization process,” a security source told AFP.

The initial structure of the operation is called RRN, after the name of the pro-Russian website RRN.world (Reliable Recent News), which was created a few months after the start of the war in Ukraine and which spread numerous falsehoods, in particular about the allegedly staged massacre in Buch.

In addition to squatting, the operation included other actions aimed at influencing the media, such as the production of cartoons against Zelenskyi or pro-Russian narratives and disinformation through so-called “reinformation” sites.

“There is no doubt that the aim was to launch a large-scale disinformation campaign against French public opinion,” a government source said.

This operation is part of a long-standing pattern of Russian influence. (photo: DreamsTime / Designer491)