Friday, January 15, 2021

Oxford Disinfo Report: India, Pakistan Among Top Nations With "High Cyber Capacity"

Oxford University's report on global disinformation ranks India and Pakistan among top 17 "high cyber troop capacity" countries. The report defines "cyber troop capacity" in terms of numbers of people and the size of budget allocated to psychological operations or information warfare. "Cyber troop activity" as defined by the report includes social media manipulation by governments and political parties, and the various private companies and other organizations they work with to spread disinformation. Oxford report shows that India's cyber troops are "centralized" while those in Pakistan, US and UK are "decentralized". EU Disinfo Lab, an NGO that specializes in disinformation campaigns, has found that India is carrying out a massive 15-year-long disinformation campaign to hurt Pakistan. 

High Cyber Capacity Countries. Source: Oxford University Disinfo Report 2020


High Cyber Capacity: 
 

Countries ranked among "high cyber troop capacity" group by the Oxford disinformation report include:   Australia, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam.   Oxford report shows that India's cyber troops are "centralized" while those in Pakistan, US and UK are "decentralized". Here's an excerpt of the report:

"High cyber troop capacity involves large numbers of staff, and large budgetary expenditure on psychological operations or information warfare. There might also be significant funds spent on research and development, as well as evidence of a multitude of techniques being used. These teams do not only operate during elections but involve full-time staff dedicated to shaping the information space. High-capacity cyber troop teams focus on foreign and domestic operations. They might also dedicate funds to state-sponsored media for overt propaganda campaigns. High-capacity teams include: Australia, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam". 

Indian Chronicles: 

EU Disinfo Lab, an NGO that specializes in disinformation campaigns, has found that India is carrying out a massive 15-year-long disinformation campaign to hurt Pakistan. The key objective of the Indian campaign as reported in "Indian Chronicles" is as follows: "The creation of fake media in Brussels, Geneva and across the world and/or the repackaging and dissemination via ANI and obscure local media networks – at least in 97 countries – to multiply the repetition of online negative content about countries in conflict with India, in particular Pakistan".  After the disclosure of India's anti-Pakistan propaganda campaign, Washington-based US analyst Michael Kugelman tweeted: "The scale and duration of the EU/UN-centered Indian disinformation campaign exposed by @DisinfoEU is staggering. Imagine how the world would be reacting if this were, say, a Russian or Chinese operation".  
American Analyst Michael Kugelman's Tweet on Indian Disinformation Campaign


Firehose of Falsehood:

What Kugelman calls "Russian Operation" appears to be a reference to a US government-funded think tank RAND Corporation's report entitled "The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model". Here is an except of the RAND report:

"Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. This propaganda includes text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via the Internet, social media, satellite television, and traditional radio and television broadcasting. The producers and disseminators include a substantial force of paid Internet “trolls” who also often attack or undermine views or information that runs counter to Russian themes, doing so through online chat rooms, discussion forums, and comments sections on news and other websites".

EU Disinformation Lab Report on India's Disinformation Campaign Against Pakistan

Indian Political Unity Against Pakistan:  

Former US President Barack Obama has observed that “Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity (in India)”.  The Indian disinformation campaign is a manifestation of Indians' political unity against Pakistan.  EU Disinfo Lab has found that Indian Chronicles is a 15-year-long campaign that started in 2005 on former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's watch, well before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's election to India's highest office in 2014. It has grown to over 750 fake media outlets covering 119 countries. There are over 750 domain names, some in the name of dead people and others using stolen identities.  Here is an excerpt of EU Disinfo Lab's report:

"The creation of fake media in Brussels, Geneva and across the world and/or the repackaging and dissemination via ANI and obscure local media networks – at least in 97 countries – to multiply the repetition of online negative content about countries in conflict with India, in particular Pakistan". 

RAND's Recipe:  

Traditional countermeasures are ineffective against "firehose of falsehoods" propaganda techniques. As researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Mathews of RAND put it: "Don't expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth." They suggest:

1. Repeating the counter-information 

2. Providing an alternative story to fill in the gaps created when false "facts" are removed 

2. Forewarning people about propaganda, highlighting the ways propagandists manipulate public opinion. 

3.  Countering the effects of propaganda, rather than the propaganda itself; for example, to counter propaganda that undermines support for a cause, work to boost support for that cause rather than refuting the propaganda directly 

5. Turning off the flow by enlisting the aid of Internet service providers and social media services, and conducting electronic warfare and cyberspace operation

Summary: 

Recently released Oxford University Report entitled "Industrialized Disinformation 2020 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation" has put both India and Pakistan among "high cyber capacity" countries. Oxford report shows that India's cyber troops are "centralized" while those in Pakistan, US and UK are "decentralized". India with its massive disinformation campaign against Pakistan appears to be following what a US think tank RAND calls "Firehose of Falsehoods". Pakistani policymakers charged with countering the Indian propaganda should read the RAND report "Firehose of Falsehoods" for its 5 specific recommendations to the US government to effectively respond to the Russian disinformation campaign. In particular they should heed its key advice: "All other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive.......Don't expect to counter Russia's firehose of falsehoods with the squirt gun of truth. Instead, put raincoats on those at whom the firehose is aimed" 


22 comments:

Riaz Haq said...

India, Pakistan among 7 nations with state actors active online for propaganda: Study
In India, cyber troop activity was found in two instances by a political party or politicians, three or more instances by a private contractor, on one instance by civil society organisation, and one by citizens and influencers.

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-pakistan-among-7-nations-with-state-actors-active-online-for-propaganda-study-6035217/

India figures in a small bunch of seven countries — along with China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela — where state actors use computational propaganda on Facebook and Twitter to influence global audiences, according to a comprehensive report on disinformation campaigns released by the Computational Propaganda project at Oxford on Thursday.

The report found at least seven instances of “cyber troops” in India, and private contractors came out to be the most active “cyber troops” in the country.

These troops are “government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online”, according to the report, and only Malaysia, Philippines, the UAE, and the US had as many or more instances as India. The report labelled India as “medium-capacity” for “cyber troops”. It stated, “Multiple teams ranging in size from 50-300 people. Multiple contracts and advertising expenditures valued at over 1.4M US.” Other countries in the category are Brazil, Pakistan, and the UK.

Over three years, the researchers examined 70 countries in which these operations do three things: suppress fundamental human rights, discredit political opposition, and drown out political dissent.

In India, cyber troop activity was found in two instances by a political party or politicians, three or more instances by a private contractor, on one instance by civil society organisation, and one by citizens and influencers.

In the first big crackdown on fake accounts for “inauthentic behaviour” in the run-up to Lok Sabha polls in April, Facebook removed more than 700 pages, groups and accounts from India. Those taken down include accounts associated with the Congress IT cell and Silver Touch Technologies, a company that has worked for the government and the BJP. They were taken down for attempts to deceive users of their identities, according to the company.

The report found that in India, bot-led automated manipulation as well as human-led manipulation spread propaganda for a party, attacked its political opposition, and spread polarising messaging designed to drive divisions.

In India, it found the use of disinformation and media manipulation, data-driven strategies, amplifying content by flooding hashtags, and troll armies that harass dissidents or journalists online. The only technique that the researchers did not find in India that was present in other countries was mass-reporting of content or accounts.

“The co-option of social media technologies provides authoritarian regimes with a powerful tool to shape public discussions and spread propaganda online, while simultaneously surveilling, censoring, and restricting digital public spaces,” the report says.

Of the 70 countries, 44 had campaigns conducted by government actors, such as a digital ministry or the military, and 45 had campaigns led by political parties or politicians, the report found. This is a 150-per cent increase in countries using organised social media manipulation campaigns.
This year, 70 countries saw campaigns of this kind; the corresponding figures 48 in 2018, and 28 in the year before.

The methodology involved news reporting analysis, a secondary literature review of public archives and scientific reports, drafting country case studies, and expert consultations.

On a platform-wise breakdown of the campaigns, India appeared on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter but not on YouTube and Instagram. Even with a growth of these activities on WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube, the report found that Facebook still firmly remained the platform with the most manipulation activity.

Riaz Haq said...

Indian cyber-spy ‘Confucius’ targets #Pakistan, #Kashmir: #Indian hackers using #malware to target Pakistani military officials, Pak's top #nuclear regulator and #Indian election officials in #Indian Occupied Kashmir, says San Francisco-based Lookout Inc.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/indian-cyber-spy-confucius-targets-pakistan-kashmir-security-report-20210211-p571q3.html

Oakland, California: A hacking group with ties to the Indian military adopted a pair of mobile surveillance tools to spy on geopolitical targets in Pakistan and Kashmir amid persistent regional tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours, according to a report from a cyber security company.

The group is known for commandeering legitimate web services in South Asia and embedding surveillance tools or malware inside apps and services to conduct espionage. Since 2017, and as recently as December, the hackers have relied on spyware to target Pakistani military officials, the country’s top nuclear regulator and Indian election officials in the disputed state of Kashmir, according to the report released by San Francisco-based Lookout Inc on Thursday.

The campaign appears to be just the latest example of hackers targeting sensitive security targets with social engineering tactics - luring victims to download malicious files disguised as benign applications. What’s unique about attacks by the group, dubbed Confucius, is the extent to which its operators go to veil their efforts, experts say.

Using knock-off web applications disguised as Google security tools and popular regional chat and dating applications, Confucius managed to access 156 victims’ devices in a trove of data recently discovered by the research team. The files and related logs were found in unsecured servers used by the attack group, according to the report. Most of the users who recently accessed those servers were based in Northern India.

Once the attackers penetrate a device, they scrape it for data, including call logs, contacts, geolocation, images and voice notes. In some cases, the hackers took screen shots of the devices and recorded phone calls. In at least one instance, intruders got inside the device of a Pakistani Air Force service member and viewed a contact list filled with other Air Force officials, said Apurva Kumar, Lookout’s staff security intelligence engineer.

“While their technical tools and malwares might not be that advanced, the Confucius threat actor invests human time to gain trust from their targets,” said Daniel Lunghi, threat researcher at the cyber security firm, Trend Micro. “And in certain sensitive fields where people are more cautious, it might be what makes the difference.”

In two cases, researchers discovered that hackers stole the contents of WhatsApp chat conversations from 2017 and 2018 between officials at the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority, Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and unknown third-parties. Then in April 2019, in the midst of India’s latest national election, the attackers burrowed into the device of an election official in the Pulwama region of Kashmir, where months earlier an Indian security convoy was attacked by a Pakistan-based Islamic terrorist in a deadly explosion.

Kumar said she couldn’t disclose the details of the stolen data.

Her research indicates the espionage campaign ramped up in 2018 after unknown hackers breached the commercial surveillance-ware provider, Retina-X Studios. Hornbill, one of the malware tools used by the attackers, shares code similarities with Retina-X’s Mobile Spy products. Another piece of malicious software called Sunbird, which is capable of remotely commandeering a user’s device, appears to be rooted in code for a stalkerware service called, BuzzOutLoud, based in India.

Riaz Haq said...

Experts are unanimous in saying that the most important target of #Indian #cyber-#espionage & #cyberattacks by far is #Pakistan. Limited employment prospects of Indian techies have created a swarm of underground threat actors in #India| The Daily Swig
https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/indian-cyber-espionage-activity-rising-amid-growing-rivalry-with-china-pakistan


Morgan Wright, chief security advisor at SentinelOne and former US State Department special advisor, told The Daily Swig: “India’s growing offensive capability is still immature compared to China, North Korea, Russia, Israel, the UK and US. However, there is no shortage of people with advanced technical skills in India.”

With Covid-19 causing significant unemployment in India, it can be “safely assumed a portion of people with these skills will engage in cybercrime”, according to Wright.

“Ironically, tactics learned in committing cybercrime will be of value to the intelligence and military establishment in India as they develop and grow units to engage in cyber warfare and espionage,” he said.


India security

Assaf Dahan, senior director and head of threat research at Cybereason, told The Daily Swig: “The level of sophistication of the activity groups affiliated with India can vary; some groups have shown a high level of sophistication and use of advanced custom-built tools or advanced exploits, while others exhibited significantly less sophisticated capabilities.

“Sometimes a group might exhibit different levels of sophistication on different operations, based on the group’s needs and reasoning,” he added.

Dahan concluded: “Another point to remember: the level of sophistication isn’t always correlated with the success rate of the group’s operation or goals. Sometimes, simple social engineering attacks delivering a known commodity malware can be enough to get the threat actors what they want.”

What examples are there of Indian APT groups?
Recent attacks by Indian hacker groups:

The highly active cyber-espionage entity known as SideWinder has been plaguing governments and enterprises since 2012. A recently released report by AT&T Alien Labs shows most of SideWinder’s activity is heavily focused on South Asia and East Asia, with the group likely supporting Indian political interests.
The allegedly Indian state-sponsored group Dropping Elephant has been known to target the Chinese government via spear-phishing and watering hole attacks.
Viceroy Tiger has been known to use weaponised Microsoft Office documents in spear-phishing campaigns. Security researchers at Lookout recently went public with research on mobile malware attributed to the threat actors and rated as medium sophistication.

The level of direct Indian government involvement in some of these operations is contested.
Cybereason’s Dahan cautioned: “The line between ‘state operated’ or ‘state ordered’ can be rather fine, so it’s not always easy to link certain operations directly to an official government or military institution, especially due to the growing popularity of cyber mercenaries (hackers-for-hire).”

How might India expand its cyber warfare capabilities and defences?
Through an emerging initiative to provide technology education to 400,000 low-income students, India will significantly increase its cyber “bench strength”, according to Mike Hamilton, former CISO for the City of Seattle and co-founder and CISO of cybersecurity firm CI Security.

Hamilton predicted that a “cybercrime population will emerge [in India] and differentiate itself from nationalist motivations”.

Other experts reckon the flow of talent will run the other way and allow Indian to expand its cyber-espionage capabilities from the cohorts of cybercriminals.

Riaz Haq said...

#China Appears to Warn #India : Push Too Hard and the Lights Could Go Out in the Entire #SouthAsian Nation of 1.3 billion. Most of the #malware was never activated in the #Mumbai grid attack that was meant as a warning to #Modi. - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/28/us/politics/china-india-hacking-electricity.html

As border skirmishing increased last year, malware began to flow into the Indian electric grid, a new study shows, and a blackout hit Mumbai. It now looks like a warning.

Early last summer, Chinese and Indian troops clashed in a surprise border battle in the remote Galwan Valley, bashing each other to death with rocks and clubs.

Four months later and more than 1,500 miles away in Mumbai, India, trains shut down and the stock market closed as the power went out in a city of 20 million people. Hospitals had to switch to emergency generators to keep ventilators running amid a coronavirus outbreak that was among India’s worst.

Now, a new study lends weight to the idea that those two events may well have been connected — as part of a broad Chinese cybercampaign against India’s power grid, timed to send a message that if India pressed its claims too hard, the lights could go out across the country.

The study shows that as the standoff continued in the Himalayas, taking at least two dozen lives, Chinese malware was flowing into the control systems that manage electric supply across India, along with a high-voltage transmission substation and a coal-fired power plant.


The flow of malware was pieced together by Recorded Future, a Somerville, Mass., company that studies the use of the internet by state actors. It found that most of the malware was never activated. And because Recorded Future could not get inside India’s power systems, it could not examine the details of the code itself, which was placed in strategic power-distribution systems across the country. While it has notified Indian authorities, so far they are not reporting what they have found.

Stuart Solomon, Recorded Future’s chief operating officer, said that the Chinese state-sponsored group, which the firm named Red Echo, “has been seen to systematically utilize advanced cyberintrusion techniques to quietly gain a foothold in nearly a dozen critical nodes across the Indian power generation and transmission infrastructure.”

The discovery raises the question about whether an outage that struck on Oct. 13 in Mumbai, one of the country’s busiest business hubs, was meant as a message from Beijing about what might happen if India pushed its border claims too vigorously.

News reports at the time quoted Indian officials as saying that the cause was a Chinese-origin cyberattack on a nearby electricity load-management center. Authorities began a formal investigation, which is due to report in the coming weeks. Since then, Indian officials have gone silent about the Chinese code, whether it set off the Mumbai blackout and the evidence provided to them by Recorded Future that many elements of the nation’s electric grid were the target of a sophisticated Chinese hacking effort.

It is possible the Indians are still searching for the code. But acknowledging its insertion, one former Indian diplomat noted, could complicate the diplomacy in recent days between China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, in an effort to ease the border tensions.

https://www.recordedfuture.com/redecho-targeting-indian-power-sector/

Riaz Haq said...

#India Suspects #China May Be Behind Major #Mumbai Blackout. Officials are investigating whether #cyberattacks from China could have caused the #power outage, an assertion that China rejects. #Modi #Ladakh https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-suspects-china-may-be-behind-major-mumbai-blackout-11614615383

Indian officials are investigating whether cyberattacks from China could have been behind a blackout in Mumbai last year.

State officials in Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, said Monday that an initial investigation by its cyber department found evidence that China could have been behind a power outage that left millions without power in October.

It was the worst blackout in decades in India’s financial capital, stopping trains and prompting hospitals to switch to diesel powered generators. The megacity has long prided itself on being one of the few cities in India with uninterrupted power supply even as most of the country struggles with regular blackouts.

Anil Deshmukh, home minister of the state, said officials were investigating a possible connection between the blackout and a surge in cyberattacks on the servers of the state power utilities. He wouldn’t single out China, but said investigators had found evidence of more than a dozen Trojan horse attacks as well as suspicious data transfers into the servers of state power companies.

“There were attempts to login to our servers from foreign land,” said Mr. Deshmukh. “We will investigate further.”

Another state official said 8GB of unaccounted for data slipped into power company servers from China and four other countries between June and October. The official cited thousands of attempts by blacklisted IP addresses to access the servers.

State-sponsored hackers increasingly target critical infrastructure such as power grids instead of specific institutions, said Amit Dubey, a cybersecurity expert at Root64 Foundation, which conducts cybercrime investigations.

“Anything and everything is dependent on power,” Mr. Dubey said. Targeting power supply, he said, can “take down hundreds of plants or day-to-day services like trains.”

Mr. Dubey said many countries such as China, Russia and Iran are deploying state-sponsored hackers to target the power grids of other nations. Russian hackers succeeded in turning off the power in many parts of Ukraine’s capital a few years ago, he said, and have also attacked critical infrastructure in the U.S. in recent years.

India’s announcement came after U.S. cybersecurity firm Recorded Future on Sunday published a report outlining what it said were attacks from close to a China-linked group it identified as RedEcho. It cited a surge in attacks targeting India’s power infrastructure.

The report said the attacks could have been a reaction to the jump in border tension between the two countries. During a military skirmish in June, India said 20 Indian soldiers were killed and China said four Chinese soldiers were killed when soldiers fought with rocks, batons and clubs wrapped in barbed wire.

In response to the Recorded Future report, which was earlier reported by the New York Times, China said it doesn’t support cyberattacks.

“It is highly irresponsible to accuse a particular party when there is no sufficient evidence around,” Wang Wenbin, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a briefing Monday. “China is firmly opposed to such irresponsible and ill-intentioned practice.

Recorded Future said it couldn’t directly connect the attacks to the Mumbai blackout because it doesn’t have access to any hardware that might have been infected.

India’s Ministry of Power said it has dealt with the threats outlined in the Recorded Future report by strengthening its firewall, blocking IP addresses and using antivirus software to scan and clean its systems software.

Riaz Haq said...

IISS: Cyber Capabilities and National Power: A Net Assessment

London-based THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES


https://www.iiss.org/blogs/research-paper/2021/06/cyber-capabilities-national-power

India has frequently been the victim of cyber attacks, including on its critical infrastructure, and has attributed a significant proportion of them to China or Pakistan. CERT-In reported, for example, that there were more than 394,499 incidents in 2019,44 and 2020 saw an upsurge in attacks from China.45 Of particular concern to the Indian government are cyber attacks by North Korea that use Chinese digital infrastructure.46 The vast major- ity of the cyber incidents flagged by CERT-In appear to have been attempts at espionage,47 but they could also have resulted in serious damage to the integrity of
Indian networks and platforms. In 2020, India had the second-highest incidence of ransomware attacks in the world48 and the government banned 117 Chinese mobile applications because of security concerns.49

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Public statements by Indian officials and other open- source material indicate that India has developed rela- tively advanced offensive cyber capabilities focused on Pakistan. It is now in the process of expanding these capabilities for wider effect.
India reportedly considered a cyber response against Pakistan in the aftermath of the November 2008 terror- ist attacks in Mumbai, with the NTRO apparently at the forefront of deliberations.67 A former national security advisor has since indicated publicly that India pos- sesses considerable capacity to conduct cyber-sabotage operations against Pakistan,68 which appears credible

--------------------
Overall, India’s focus on Pakistan will have given it useful operational experience and some viable regional offensive cyber capabilities. It will need to expand its cyber-intelligence reach to be able to deliver sophisti- cated offensive effect further afield, but its close collab- oration with international partners, especially the US, will help it in that regard.

----------------
Raj Chengappa and Sandeep Unnithan, ‘How to Punish Pakistan’, India Today, 22 September 2016, https://www. indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/20161003-uri- attack-narendra-modi-pakistan-terror-kashmir-nawaz-sharif- india-vajpayee-829603-2016-09-22.

Riaz Haq said...

Pakistan-linked hackers targeted Indian power company with ReverseRat

https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/pakistan-linked-hackers-targeted-indian.html

A threat actor with suspected ties to Pakistan has been striking government and energy organizations in the South and Central Asia regions to deploy a remote access trojan on compromised Windows systems, according to new research.

"Most of the organizations that exhibited signs of compromise were in India, and a small number were in Afghanistan," Lumen's Black Lotus Labs said in a Tuesday analysis. "The potentially compromised victims aligned with the government and power utility verticals."

Some of the victims include a foreign government organization, a power transmission organization, and a power generation and transmission organization. The covert operation is said to have begun at least in January 2021.

The intrusions are notable for a number of reasons, not least because in addition to its highly-targeted nature, the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the adversary rely on repurposed open-source code and the use of compromised domains in the same country as the targeted entity to host their malicious files.

At the same time, the group has been careful to hide their activity by modifying the registry keys, granting them the ability to surreptitiously maintain persistence on the target device without attracting attention.

Explaining the multi-step infection chain, Lumen noted the campaign "resulted in the victim downloading two agents; one resided in-memory, while the second was side-loaded, granting threat actor persistence on the infected workstations."

The attack commences with a malicious link sent via phishing emails or messages that, when clicked, downloads a ZIP archive file containing a Microsoft shortcut file (.lnk) and a decoy PDF file from a compromised domain.

The shortcut file, besides displaying the benign document to the unsuspecting recipient, also takes care of stealthily fetching and running an HTA (HTML application) file from the same compromised website.

The lure documents largely describe events catering to India, disguising as a user manual for registering and booking an appointment for COVID-19 vaccine through the CoWIN online portal, while a few others masquerade as the Bombay Sappers, a regiment of the Corps of Engineers of the Indian Army.

Riaz Haq said...

India source:

Pakistan plans to set up international media channel funded by China to build narrative: Report (India Today) The leaked documents that Indian agencies have laid their hands on from Pakistan's security establishment show that Pakistan wants to collaborate with China to carry out an information war campaign globally, with Beijing providing finances and guidance.

https://thecyberwire.com/newsletters/daily-briefing/10/118


The leaked documents that Indian agencies have laid their hands on from Pakistan's security establishment show that Pakistan wants to collaborate with China to carry out an information war campaign globally, with Beijing providing finances and guidance.

The concept paper, reviewed by India Today, is titled ‘Building capacity to contest inimical narratives through counter on alternative narratives.’

The paper says the projects looks at truth and factual aspects with a view to quashing misperception.

Internal dynamics in Pakistan are favourable for open media but financial challenges are a hurdle, the paper says while justifying the need to team up with China.

“There is a need for a media house of the stature of Al Jazeera and RT to propel amenable narrative. A media house by Pakistan and funded by China will achieve the stipulated objectives,” the document states.


https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/pakistan-china-international-media-channel-1816998-2021-06-19

Riaz Haq said...

India’s Gandhi and Pakistan’s Khan tapped as targets in Israeli NSO spyware scandal - Tech News - Haaretz.com


https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-news/.premium-india-s-gandhi-and-pakistan-s-khan-tapped-as-israeli-nso-spyware-targets-1.10012729

Prominent Indian politician Rahul Gandhi and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan were selected as potential targets of the Israeli-made Pegasus spyware program by clients of the NSO Group cyberespionage firm, a global investigation can reveal Monday.

Additional potential targets included Pakistani officials, including a number once associated with Pakistani leader Khan. They also included Kashmiri separatists, leading Tibetan religious figures and even an Indian supreme court judge. Khan did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Post.

Gandhi, who said he changes phones every few months to avoid being hacked, said in response: “Targeted surveillance of the type you describe, whether in regard to me, other leaders of the opposition or indeed any law-abiding citizen of India, is illegal and deplorable.

According to an analysis of the Pegasus Project records, more than 180 journalists were selected in 21 countries by at least 12 NSO clients. The potential targets and clients hail from Bahrain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, India, Mexico, Hungary, Azerbaijan, Togo and Rwanda.

----------

India is Israel’s biggest arms market, buying around $1 billion worth of weapons every year, according to Reuters. The two countries have grown closer since Modi became Indian prime minister in 2014, widening commercial cooperation beyond their longstanding defense ties. Modi became the first sitting Indian leader to visit Israel in July 2017, while former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a state visit to India at the start of 2018

Riaz Haq said...

#Disinformation Industry is Booming. Abhay Aggarwal, head of #Toronto-based CEO of #disinfo company "Press Monitor", says that his company’s services are used by the #Indian government. Disinfo campaigns have recently been found promoting #BJP #Modi https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/world/europe/disinformation-social-media.html

Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies.

They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability.

“Disinfo-for-hire actors being employed by government or government-adjacent actors is growing and serious,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, calling it “a boom industry.”

Similar campaigns have been recently found promoting India’s ruling party, Egyptian foreign policy aims and political figures in Bolivia and Venezuela.

Mr. Brookie’s organization tracked one operating amid a mayoral race in Serra, a small city in Brazil. An ideologically promiscuous Ukrainian firm boosted several competing political parties.

In India, dozens of government-run Twitter accounts have shared posts from India Vs Disinformation, a website and set of social media feeds that purport to fact-check news stories on India.

India Vs Disinformation is, in reality, the product of a Canadian communications firm called Press Monitor.

Nearly all the posts seek to discredit or muddy reports unfavorable to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, including on the country’s severe Covid-19 toll. An associated site promotes pro-Modi narratives under the guise of news articles.

A Digital Forensic Research Lab report investigating the network called it “an important case study” in the rise of “disinformation campaigns in democracies.”

A representative of Press Monitor, who would identify himself only as Abhay, called the report completely false.

He specified only that it incorrectly identified his firm as Canada-based. Asked why the company lists a Toronto address, a Canadian tax registration and identifies as “part of Toronto’s thriving tech ecosystem,” or why he had been reached on a Toronto phone number, he said that he had business in many countries. He did not respond to an email asking for clarification.

A LinkedIn profile for Abhay Aggarwal identifies him as the Toronto-based chief executive of Press Monitor and says that the company’s services are used by the Indian government.
A set of pro-Beijing operations hint at the field’s capacity for rapid evolution.

Since 2019, Graphika, a digital research firm, has tracked a network it nicknamed “Spamouflage” for its early reliance on spamming social platforms with content echoing Beijing’s line on geopolitical issues. Most posts received little or no engagement.

In recent months, however, the network has developed hundreds of accounts with elaborate personas. Each has its own profile and posting history that can seem authentic. They appeared to come from many different countries and walks of life.

Graphika traced the accounts back to a Bangladeshi content farm that created them in bulk and probably sold them to a third party.

The network pushes strident criticism of Hong Kong democracy activists and American foreign policy. By coordinating without seeming to, it created an appearance of organic shifts in public opinion — and often won attention.

The accounts were amplified by a major media network in Panama, prominent politicians in Pakistan and Chile, Chinese-language YouTube pages, the left-wing British commentator George Galloway and a number of Chinese diplomatic accounts.

A separate pro-Beijing network, uncovered by a Taiwanese investigative outlet called The Reporter, operated hundreds of Chinese-language websites and social media accounts.


Riaz Haq said...

Abhay Aggarwal 3rd degree connection3rd
Media Monitoring, Public Relations, Digital Marketing, Content, Infographics, Video, Web and Mobile Apps Development
Toronto, Ontario, Canada Contact info

Press Monitor

https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhay-aggarwal/?originalSubdomain=ca


Press Monitor is India's leading media monitoring service.

Press Monitor services are used by President of India, Prime Minister of India, all the ministries of the Indian government, all Indian embassies worldwide, statutory bodies, regulatory bodies, public sector undertakings, multinational companies and Indian enterprises.

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Abhay Aggarwal
Media Monitoring, Public Relations, Digital Marketing, Content, Infographics, Video, Web and Mobile Apps Development

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Abhay Aggarwal
Abhay Aggarwal 3rd degree connection3rd
Media Monitoring, Public Relations, Digital Marketing, Content, Infographics, Video, Web and Mobile Apps Development
Toronto, Ontario, Canada Contact info

Press Monitor
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About
Nearly 24 years experience in dealing with senior executives and business leaders. Two decades experience involving application of mind and discretion.

Strong understanding of business issues at national and international level. Daily interaction with news over 24 years.

Ability to lead complex projects from concept to fully operational status. Have handled projects in the UK, India and working closely with the government of Seychelles.

Goal-oriented individual with strong leadership capabilities. Managing team of 60 people with very little staff turnover. Many employees have stayed for more than 10 years.

Ability to do business in an international environment cutting across geographies, ethnic backgrounds, and languages.

Specialties: Business representation in the UK, News Aggregation Services, Web-based application development

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Abhay Aggarwal
Media Monitoring, Public Relations, Digital Marketing, Content, Infographics, Video, Web and Mobile Apps Development

More

Message

Abhay Aggarwal
Abhay Aggarwal 3rd degree connection3rd
Media Monitoring, Public Relations, Digital Marketing, Content, Infographics, Video, Web and Mobile Apps Development
Toronto, Ontario, Canada Contact info

Press Monitor
500+ connections

--
Nearly 24 years experience in dealing with senior executives and business leaders. Two decades experience involving application of mind and discretion.

Strong understanding of business issues at national and international level. Daily interaction with news over 24 years.

Ability to lead complex projects from concept to fully operational status. Have handled projects in the UK, India and working closely with the government of Seychelles.

Goal-oriented individual with strong leadership capabilities. Managing team of 60 people with very little staff turnover. Many employees have stayed for more than 10 years.

Ability to do business in an international environment cutting across geographies, ethnic backgrounds, and languages.

Specialties: Business representation in the UK, News Aggregation Services, Web-based application development


Riaz Haq said...

My Heart Belongs to Kashmir
An Analysis of a Pro-Indian Army Covert Influence Operation on Twitter


https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/india-twitter-takedown

On August 24, 2022, Twitter shared 15 datasets of information operations it identified and removed from the platform with researchers in the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium for independent analysis. One of these datasets included 1,198 accounts that tweeted about India and Pakistan. Twitter suspended the network for violating their Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy, and said that the presumptive country of origin was India. Our report builds on a report on this same network by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

The network tweeted primarily in English, but also in Hindi and Urdu. Accounts claimed to be proud Kashmiris and relatives of Indian soldiers. Tweets praised the Indian Army’s military successes and provision of services in India-administered Kashmir and criticized the militaries of China and Pakistan. Two accounts existed to target specific individuals who were perceived as enemies of the Indian government.

Twitter is not publicly attributing this network to any actor, and the open source evidence did not allow us to make any independent attribution. In the report, however, we highlight some noteworthy articles in the Indian press. These articles show that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have previously temporarily suspended the official accounts for the Chinar Corps. The Chinar Corps is a branch of the Indian army that operates in Kashmir. One article, citing Army officials as its source, says that the Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended for "coordinated inauthentic behavior." Our report also notes that the content of the Twitter network is consistent with the Chinar Corps’ objectives, praising the work of the Indian Army in India-occupied Kashmir, and that the official Chinar Corps Twitter account is one of the most mentioned or retweeted account in the network.

Riaz Haq said...

US report unearths Indian army propaganda campaign

The purpose of the Twitter accounts in the network was to praise the Indian Army for their "military successes" and "provision of humanitarian services in India-administered Kashmir".



https://twitter.com/stanfordio/status/1572627130449821697?s=20&t=pvTw90fcd7d848Nk8iWawQ



https://www.globalvillagespace.com/us-report-unearths-indian-army-propaganda-campaign/



Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) recently published a report analyzing a pro-Indian Army propaganda campaign on social media.

To clarify, the Stanford Internet Observatory is a program of the Cyber Policy Center which is a joint initiative of the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies and the prestigious Stanford Law School in the US.


The report titled “My Heart Belongs to Kashmir: An Analysis of a Pro-Indian Army Covert Influence Operation on Twitter” takes note of a Twitter network that was recently suspended and concludes that the network was consistent with the Chinar Corps.

To clarify, the Chinar Corps is a Corps of the Indian Army that is presently located in Srinagar and responsible for military operations in the Kashmir Valley. Chinar Corps also has social media accounts where it consistently promotes a positive image of the Indian Army despite its internationally recognized human rights violations in Kashmir. Moreover, the social media accounts of Chinar Corps were suspended and blocked for short periods of time on multiple occasions for “coordinated inauthentic activity”.

Last month, Twitter identified a network of over 1000 accounts that tweeted about India and Pakistan. Twitter suspended the network for violating its Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy and said that the presumptive country of origin was India.

Indian propaganda?
The SIO report notes that while the network was not attributed to any actor or organization, there were many similarities to the Chinar Corps.

“The content of the Twitter network is consistent with the Chinar Corps’ objectives, praising the work of the Indian Army in India-occupied Kashmir,” the SIO report states.

The network was made up of several Twitter accounts posing as fake Kashmiris with images taken from elsewhere on the internet, for instance, Getty Stock Images.

“Tweets tagging journalists aimed either to bring events to the attention of reporters or to bring the reporter to the attention of followers—often in an apparent attempt to target the reporter for what was framed as anti-India content,” the report further revealed.

Moreover, the purpose of the Twitter accounts in the network was to praise the Indian Army for their “military successes” and “provision of humanitarian services in India-administered Kashmir”. The accounts also criticized Pakistan and China who are rivals of India.

Riaz Haq said...

Pentagon Orders Review of Its Overseas Social Media Campaigns
The move comes after Twitter and Facebook shut down misleading accounts that they determined were sending messages to promote U.S. foreign policy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/us/politics/pentagon-social-media.html

WASHINGTON — White House officials told the military that they were concerned about its efforts to spread pro-American messaging on social media, prompting the Pentagon to order a review of secretive operations to influence populations overseas, U.S. officials said.

The review follows a decision by Twitter and Facebook over the summer to shut down misleading accounts that they determined were sending messages about U.S. foreign policy interests abroad.

The Pentagon audit and White House concerns were first reported by The Washington Post.

Disinformation researchers said the campaigns largely fell into two camps. Most of the campaigns spread pro-American messages, including memes and slogans that praised the United States. Those programs were similar to how Beijing often spreads disinformation by seeding positive messages about life in China.

One campaign targeting Iran, however, spread divisive messages about life there. The accounts involved pushed out views that both supported and opposed the Iranian government. That disinformation effort resembled the methods used by Russia to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

For years U.S. military commands have promoted pro-American news and messages for audiences overseas, sometimes earning the scrutiny of Congress. But the decision by the social media companies to shut down some accounts associated with the military suggested that the activity had gone further.

Twitter and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, removed accounts that they said violated their terms of service by taking part in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

A report in August by Stanford University’s Internet Observatory and the social media analytics firm Graphika said those accounts were pushing pro-American messages in the Middle East and Central Asia. The two groups attributed some of the accounts taken down by Facebook and Twitter to the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, a more than 10-year-old Pentagon initiative that sends out information in support of the United States in areas where the U.S. military operates.

The postings varied widely in sophistication. Some of the more polished work was aimed at Twitter and Telegram users in Iran and pushed a wide variety of views. While most of the messages were critical of the Iranian government, researchers said others were supportive of it, the kind of activity that could potentially be designed to inflame debate and sow divisions in the country.

Riaz Haq said...

Video: Indian Film Festival IFFI Jury Head Calls 'Kashmir Files' "Vulgar"
Calling it "propaganda" and a "vulgar movie", Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who headed the IFFI jury, said "all of them" were "disturbed and shocked" to see the film screened at the festival.

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/film-festival-iffi-jury-head-calls-the-kashmir-files-vulgar-propaganda-3560980

New Delhi: The jury of 53rd International Film Festival in Goa has slammed the controversial movie "The Kashmir Files", which revolves around the killings and exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990 from Kashmir Valley. Calling it "propaganda" and a "vulgar movie", Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who headed the IFFI jury, said "all of them" were "disturbed and shocked" to see the film screened at the festival.
"It seemed to us like a propagandist movie inappropriate for an artistic, competitive section of such a prestigious film festival. I feel totally comfortable to share openly these feelings here with you on stage. Since the spirit of having a festival is to accept also a critical discussion which is essential for art and for life," Mr Lapid said in his address.

The Anupam Kher, Mithun Chakraborty and Pallavi Joshi starrer, directed by Vivek Agnihotri, was featured in the "Panorama" section of the festival last week.


The film has been praised by the BJP and has been declared tax-free in most BJP-ruled states and was a box office hit. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah have praised on the movie.

Many, however, have criticised the content, calling it a one-sided portrayal of the events that is sometimes factually incorrect and claiming the movie has a "propagandist tone".

In May, Singapore banned the movie, citing concerns over its "potential to cause enmity between different communities".

"The film will be refused classification for its provocative and one-sided portrayal of Muslims and the depictions of Hindus being persecuted in the ongoing conflict in Kashmir," read a statement from the Singapore government, reported news agency Press Trust of India.

Mr Agnihotri has alleged an "international political campaign" against him and his film by foreign media.

He claimed this was the reason his press conference was cancelled by the Foreign Correspondents Club and the Press Club of India in May.

Riaz Haq said...

Ignite Conducts Karachi Qualifier Round of Digital Pakistan Cybersecurity Hackathon 2022

https://propakistani.pk/2022/12/02/ignite-conducts-karachi-qualifier-round-of-digital-pakistan-cybersecurity-hackathon-2022/


Ignite National Technology Fund, a public sector company with the Ministry of IT & Telecom, conducted the qualifier round of Digital Pakistan Cybersecurity Hackathon 2022 in Karachi on 1st December 2022 after conducting qualifier rounds at Quetta and Lahore.

The Cybersecurity Hackathon aims to improve the cybersecurity readiness, protection, and incident response capabilities of the country by conducting cyber drills at a national level and identifying cybersecurity talent for public and private sector organizations.

Dr. Zain ul Abdin, General Manager Ignite, stated that Ignite was excited about organizing Pakistan’s 2nd nationwide cybersecurity hackathon in five cities this year. The purpose of the Cyber Security Hackathon 2022 is to train and prepare cyber security experts in Pakistan, he said.

Speaking on the occasion, Asim Shahryar Husain, CEO Ignite, said, “The goal of the cybersecurity hackathon is to create awareness about the rising importance of cybersecurity for Pakistan and also to identify and motivate cybersecurity talent which can be hired by public and private sector organizations to secure their networks from cyberattacks.”

“There is a shortage of 3-4 million cybersecurity professionals globally. So this is a good opportunity for Pakistan to build capacity of its IT graduates in cybersecurity so that they can boost our IT exports in future,” he added.

Chief guest, Mohsin Mushtaq, Additional Secretary (Incharge) IT & Telecommunication, said, “Digital Pakistan Cybersecurity Hackathon is a step towards harnessing the national talent to form a national cybersecurity response team.”

“Ignite will continue to hold such competitions every year to identify new talent. I would like to congratulate CEO Ignite and his team for holding such a marathon competition across Pakistan to motivate cybersecurity students and professionals all over the country,” he added.

Top cybersecurity experts were invited for keynote talks during the occasion including Moataz Salah, CEO Cyber Talents, Egypt, and Mehzad Sahar, Group Head InfoSec Engro Corp, who delivered the keynote address on Smart InfoSec Strategy.

Panelists from industry, academia, and MoITT officials participated in two panel discussions on “Cyber Threats and Protection Approaches” and “Indigenous Capability & Emerging Technologies” during the event.

The event also included a cybersecurity quiz competition in which 17 teams participated from different universities. The top three teams in the competition were awarded certificates.

41 teams competed from Karachi in the Digital Pakistan Cybersecurity Hackathon 2022.

The top three teams shortlisted after the eight-hour hackathon were: “Team Control” (Winner); “Revolt” (1st Runner-up); and “ASD” (2nd Runner-up).

These top teams will now compete in the final round of the hackathon in Islamabad later this month.

Riaz Haq said...

Hindu Nationalists often quote known fake sites set up by their Hindutva friends. These sites have now been fully exposed.

Both Op India and thedisinfolab.org are part of the Hindutva disinformation campaigns to spew hatred against Muslims.

OpIndia is a propaganda outlet controlled by BJP.

OpIndia: Hate speech, vanishing advertisers, and an undisclosed BJP connection
Ashok Kumar Gupta, the director of OpIndia’s holding company, has had affiliations with the Sangh Parivar.

https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/06/23/opindia-hate-speech-vanishing-advertisers-and-an-undisclosed-bjp-connection

“In India, politics and journalism attract some of the worst brains, thanks to the system that has evolved over time,” read the About Us section of OpIndia, a popular Hindu supremacist website, in December 2014, nearly a year after it was launched. “OpIndia.com is an attempt to break free of this system.”


https://thedisinfolab.org is a clone of EU Disinfo Lab set up by Hindu Nationalists to fool the world.

The real EU Disinfo Lab website is https://www.disinfo.eu/

Here's a link to the REAL Disinfo Lab: https://www.disinfo.eu/publications/indian-chronicles-deep-dive-into-a-15-year-operation-targeting-the-eu-and-un-to-serve-indian-interests/

Indian Chronicles: deep dive into a 15-year operation targeting the EU and UN to serve Indian interests

Following a preliminary investigation published in 2019, the EU DisinfoLab uncovered a massive operation targeting international institutions and serving Indian interests. “Indian Chronicles” – the name we gave to this operation – resurrected dead media, dead think-tanks and NGOs. It even resurrected dead people. This network is active in Brussels and Geneva in producing and amplifying content to undermine – primarily – Pakistan.

Riaz Haq said...

How did India become a fake news hot spot?

https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-how-did-india-become-a-fake-news-hot-spot/video-62770787

Low digital literacy, political and religious biases, as well as the functionality of social media platforms, have turned India into a hub for fake news. But how can this be countered?

Riaz Haq said...

Impact Of Fake News On Pakistan – OpEd

https://www.eurasiareview.com/10012023-impact-of-fake-news-on-pakistan-oped/

By Muhammad Usman Ghani


Pakistan, like the rest of the world, is facing a major threat from fake news. Access to news, political division, manipulation of social media conversations, trust in the news media, health information, and hate speech are all things that fake news has caused or spread.

According to a report by Media Matters for Democracy (MMfD), from 2015 to 2020, the number of Pakistani broadband Internet users went from 17 million to 83 million, which is almost a fourfold increase. The number of mobile broadband users grew the most. Despite a considerable digital divide—Internet penetration is less than 44% of the population—the availability of 3G and 4G mobile Internet has also led to a small but consistent growth in social media use. From 2013 on, political debates on the two biggest social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, became more popular in Pakistan. This followed a trend that was almost identical to the one seen in the United States. MMfD published that nine out of ten Pakistanis currently see disinformation as an issue, and seventy percent of the population thinks Facebook’s platform is utilized most often to propagate misinformation in the nation.

Fake news messages have significantly impacted the public’s opinion of Pakistan’s anti-polio vaccination campaign. In order to discourage parents from vaccinating their children, these misinformation tactics draw on existing vaccine scepticism and common religious or xenophobic stereotypes. In 2019, a fake video about how vaccinations affect children caused hundreds of thousands of Facebook users to interact with false anti-vaccine information. This may have been part of a chain of events that led to the suspension of the country’s anti-polio vaccination campaign. Similarly, press reports and public surveys revealed that COVID-19 misinformation campaigns caused many to believe the coronavirus was a foreign scheme, an overblown danger, or a fake. Such ideas seem to have directly affected people’s attitude about COVID-19 precautions, as seen by the public’s irresponsible behavior before the second coronavirus outbreak in Pakistan. The COVID-19 deception also caused some to avoid medical care and commit violent crimes against health personnel. People were getting the wrong idea from fake messages and conspiracy theories that doctors were working together to make more people die from the coronavirus.

“DisInfo Lab,” a non-governmental organization based in the EU, created a matrix of the Indian misinformation campaign in 2019 and 2020. This campaign relied heavily on fake news sources in social media and mainstream media to lobby international and civil society against Pakistan. Since 2005, the Indian news agency Asian News International (ANI) and the Delhi-based Shrivastava group have contributed to the creation of 256 anti-Pakistan websites that disseminate false information to 65 countries. Reports say that important parts of the larger syndicate were social organizations and humanitarian groups with ties to the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU). Nearly ten UNHRC-affiliated NGOs have been identified as spreading anti-Pakistan propaganda. During the campaign, Dr. Louis B. Sohn, a Harvard professor of International Humanitarian Law, took part in humanitarian conferences about the Baloch separatist movement in 2011.

This cyber misinformation effort, which lasted for over a decade, was reportedly signed in placing Pakistan on the “grey list” of the FATF, which carries accusations of funding violent extremism. Since then, Pakistan has worked hard to change the mix of false ideas about it. The current government of Pakistan has put out a detailed report on how India has lied and been dishonest in international affairs. Still, the United Nations Security Council and its important P5 members haven’t done much to deal with or stop the growing threat.

Riaz Haq said...

Pakistani student uses AI to combat propaganda on social media

https://mmnews.tv/pakistani-student-uses-ai-to-combat-propaganda-on-social-media/


Muhammad Umar, A Pakistani student at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), has made a significant contribution in detecting propaganda on social media platforms, especially in cases where there is a mixture of low and high-resource languages.

Umar, who is from Pakistan and speaks Urdu as his first language, is one of many people who are contributing to the large amounts of research and time being spent on languages other than English for preservation, education, and language modelling.

Umar, who holds a Master of Science in natural language processing (NLP), is aware of the influence that language has on public conversation and the way that opinions are formed.

“Propaganda is a pervasive tool used to manipulate public opinion, and it is a growing concern in the digital age, especially in bilingual communities where little to no work has been done to detect it. Most propaganda detection work has been done on high-resource languages, such as English, leaving low-resource languages largely unexplored,” said Umar, who is part of the university’s first cohort of NLP graduates.

Umar noted that code-switching, which involves mixing multiple languages in the same text, is common in low-resource language communities and can make propaganda detection more challenging.

“In linguistics, code-switching refers to the practice of alternating between two or more languages or language varieties in a single conversation or text. In the context of my thesis, code-switched social media text specifically refers to social media text that uses a mixture of different languages, including English and Roman Urdu.”

Despite graduating, Umar is continuing his research and hopes to submit a paper related to detecting propaganda techniques in code-switched text at the 2023 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference, one of the primary high impact NLP and artificial intelligence conferences for NLP research.

Riaz Haq said...

Meta’s India team delayed action against Army-led misinformation operation in Kashmir: Washington Post - The Hindu



https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/metas-india-team-delayed-action-against-army-led-misinfo-op-in-kashmir-us-news-report/article67352470.ece

Facebook parent Meta’s Indian team delayed action against an organised propaganda and misinformation operation led by the Indian Army’s Chinar Corps in Jammu and Kashmir for a year, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing former employees at the company. According to the report, Army officials met representatives of Twitter and Facebook and defended the operation as a counter against Pakistani misinformation networks.

The report cited members of Meta’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) team for Facebook, whose brief was to flag fake profiles and networks of accounts that artificially amplified messages on the social network around the world. When the CIB flagged the Chinar Corps’s alleged operation, Meta staff in India reportedly “warned against antagonising the government of a sovereign nation over actions in territory it controls,” and expressed concern that local employees “could be imprisoned for treason,” the Post reported.

Disinformation campaign
It is unclear what the Chinar Corps’ network was posting, but the report cites “disinformation that put Kashmiri journalists in danger,” adding that many CIB employees at Facebook quit the company after Indian Meta staff stymied any pushback. The operation reportedly targeted Srinagar-based media outlet The Kashmiriyat and its editor Qazi Shibli. The Hindu has reached out to Army representatives for comment.

“As a global company, we operate in an increasingly complex regulatory environment and are focused on keeping people safe when they use our services and ensuring the safety of our employees in a manner consistent with applicable laws and human rights principles,” Meta said in a statement shared with The Hindu, adding that it prohibited coordinated inauthentic behaviour on its platforms.



This is not the first time the social media firm has been accused of allowing propaganda networks in India to go unchecked. In 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that posts by Telangana BJP MLA T. Raja Singh calling for violence against Rohingya immigrants from Myanmar were not taken down, in spite of warnings from Meta staff in the U.S., due to pushback from Ankhi Das, Mr. Thukral’s predecessor.

Riaz Haq said...

Dr. Audrey Truschke
@AudreyTruschke
Disinfo Labs — a group that promotes far-right Hindutva conspiracy theories against critics of the Modi government — is an Indian intelligence operation, WaPo reports.

Some thoughts on why this matters —

https://x.com/AudreyTruschke/status/1734210988625305897?s=20

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EU DisinfoLab
@DisinfoEU
Many of you read
@wapo
’s investigation and we want to reiterate that there's no association between us and 'The DisinfoLab', an Indian entity.

@gerryshih
revealed their connections to Indian Intelligence and a deliberate use of our name to leverage our established credibility.

https://x.com/DisinfoEU/status/1734220723764236601?s=20

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Covert Indian operation seeks to discredit Modi’s critics in the U.S. - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/10/india-the-disinfo-lab-discredit-critics/

The Disinfo Lab, which at one point consisted of about a dozen private contractors working out of a four-story whitewashed building on a leafy street in New Delhi, was created in mid-2020 by Lt. Col. Dibya Satpathy, now 39, an intelligence officer who has worked to shape international perceptions of India, said the three people familiar with the operation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence activities.

Satpathy was initially commissioned as an infantry officer and served in the army’s intelligence and public information units, said a person briefed on his military personnel record. That person and another source close to the military said Satpathy was later detailed to his current posting with India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). Over the years, Satpathy has introduced himself to Western journalists and commentators under fake identities — including his preferred alias, Shakti, meaning “power” in Hindi — and sought favorable coverage of India or critical coverage of its adversaries, Pakistan and China, according to five additional people who have had contact with Satpathy.