The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions on Wednesday against two 46-year-old Russian citizens and the companies they own for engaging in cyber influence operations.
Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze (Gambashidze), founder of the Moscow Social Design Agency (SDA), and Nikolay Alexander, CEO and current owner of the Russian company Group Structura LLC (Structura) Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tupikin are both accused of providing services to the Russian government related to “malign foreign influence activities.”
The broader cybersecurity community is tracking the disinformation campaign, known as “Doppelganger,” which uses inauthentic news sites and social media accounts to target audiences in Europe and the United States.
“SDA and Structura have been identified as key players in the event, responsible for delivering [the Government of the Russian Federation] Providing a variety of services, including the creation of websites designed to impersonate European government organizations and legitimate media,” the Treasury said.
Gambashidze and Tupikin are both accused of orchestrating a campaign in the fall of 2022 that created a network of more than 60 websites designed to appear as legitimate news sites and fake social media accounts in order to spread content from these deceptive sites.
The department said the fake website was built to mimic the appearance of the real website, with the portal including embedded images and working links to legitimate websites and even mimicking cookie consent pages as part of the effort to deceive visitors.
In addition, Chainaanalysis said that a closer examination of two OFAC-listed cryptocurrency wallets linked to Gambashidze revealed that they had received more than $200,000 worth of USDT on the TRON network, a large portion of which came from the now-approved Exchange Garantex.
“He then cashed out most of the funds to a deposit address on a major exchange,” the blockchain analytics firm noted. “These transactions highlight Garantex’s continued involvement in the Russian government’s illicit activities.”
Doppelganger has been active since at least February 2022, and Meta describes it as “the largest and most sustained Russian-origin operation.”
In December 2023, Recorded Future revealed malicious networks attempting to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to create inauthentic news articles and generate scalable impact content.
SDA and Structura, along with Gambashidze, have also been sanctioned by the EU Council since July 2023 for conducting a digital information manipulation campaign called “Recent Reliable News” (RRN) aimed at expanding support for Russia’s war propaganda against Ukraine.
“This event […] “Relying on fake web pages to steal identities from state media and government websites, as well as fake accounts on social media,” the committee said at the time. “This coordinated and targeted manipulation of information is part of Russia’s broader hybrid operations targeting the country.” .The European Union and its Member States.”
This development comes as the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill (Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, HR 7520) that would prohibit data brokers from selling sensitive data of Americans to foreign adversaries, including China , Russia, North Korea and other countries. Iran.
A week ago, Congress passed another bill (Protecting Americans from Apps Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act, HR 7521) that seeks to force Chinese company ByteDance to divest itself of the popular video-sharing platform within six months TikTok, or risk being banned. Security Question.
