Fake Ukrainian Surrender Facebook Posts Tied to Belarusian Group
Facebook parent company Meta is accusing Belarus of trying to spread disinformation about the war in Ukraine, including fake posts that claimed Ukrainian soldiers had surrendered.
According to Meta, the activity is tied to Belarus' State Security Committee, also known as the KGB. The intelligence agency allegedly posted in English and Polish “about Ukrainian troops surrendering without a fight and the nation’s leaders fleeing the country on February 24.”
“Prior to that, this particular threat actor primarily focused on accusing Poland of mistreating migrants from the Middle East,” Meta added. “On March 14, they pivoted back to Poland and created an event in Warsaw calling for a protest against the Polish government. We disabled the account and event that same day.”
The company made the claim in a Thursday Adversarial Threat Report, which documents the disinformation and hacking campaigns Meta has been encountering on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
In the report, Meta also mentions a hacking group, dubbed Ghostwriter, which security researchers suspect has ties to the Belarusian government. According to the company, Ghostwriter has been busy trying to hijack social media accounts belonging to dozens members of the Ukrainian military.
“As we’ve shared before, Ghostwriter typically targets people through email compromise and then uses that to gain access to their social media accounts across the internet,” the report said. “In a handful of cases, they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared.”
Meta also stopped a group in Russia from trying to trick the company into shutting down
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