Russian Fake News Leaks

A Report worth reading is the new one by Citizen's Lab at the University of Toronto.  They do some good work but this one is timely and interesting in the context of all the leaks we seem to be having here in the United States. The technique uses a fake story supposedly by real journalists, and variations on that theme - a lot of variations.  This from the intro:

• Documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of the Russian government were manipulated and then released as a “leak” to discredit domestic and foreign critics of the government. We call this technique “tainted leaks.”

• The operation against the journalist led us to the discovery of a larger phishing operation, with over 200 unique targets spanning 39 countries (including members of 28 governments). The list includes a former Russian Prime Minister, members of cabinets from Europe and Eurasia, ambassadors, high ranking military officers, CEOs of energy companies, and members of civil society.

• After government targets, the second largest set (21%) are members of civil society including academics, activists, journalists, and representatives of non-governmental organizations.

• We have no conclusive evidence that links these operations to a particular Russian government agency; however, there is clear overlap between our evidence and that presented by numerous industry and government reports concerning Russian-affiliated threat actors.

The report goes into some detail on how this was done and the extent of the operations, but is not firmly making  the Russian government to blame.  Either the Russians are getting better at this, which we would expect, or we are getting less able to determine the sources of this kind of propaganda.  Note:  The report is written in Canada so the government is their government.