T0007 "Create Inauthentic Social Media Pages and Groups"

Tactic stage: TA15

Summary: Create key social engineering assets needed to amplify content, manipulate algorithms, fool public and/or specific incident/campaign targets. Computational propaganda depends substantially on false perceptions of credibility and acceptance. By creating fake users and groups with a variety of interests and commitments, attackers can ensure that their messages both come from trusted sources and appear more widely adopted than they actually are.

Relationships

Has counters:

Detection methods include:

Datasets

Examples include:

E000007 Paying for access to existing accounts: Ukraine elections (2019) circumvent Facebook’s new safeguards by paying Ukrainian citizens to give a Russian agent access to their personal pages.
E000008 Avaaz-reported pages and groups: EU Elections (2019) Avaaz reported more than 500 suspicious pages and groups to Facebook related to the three-month investigation of Facebook disinformation networks in Europe.
E000009 Fakes listed in the US Mueller report: Mueller report (2016) The IRA was able to reach up to 126 million Americans on Facebook via a mixture of fraudulent accounts, groups, and advertisements, the report says. Twitter accounts it created were portrayed as real American voices by major news outlets. It was even able to hold real-life rallies, mobilizing hundreds of people at a time in major cities like Philadelphia and Miami.

Seen in incidents:

I00005 as Fake FB groups + dark content:
I00006 as Fake twitter profiles to amplify: Twitter bots used to drive visbility
I00009 as FB pages:
I00010 as FB pages/groups/profiles:
I00017 as Fake FB groups + dark content:
I00022 as Fake FB groups/pages/profiles + dark content:
I00032 as Fake FB groups/pages/profiles :
I00056 as Fake FB groups/pages/profiles + dark content (non-paid advertising):