Briefing: UK's new anti-disinfo unit

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Craig showed how to use two free tools to map the digital ad partners of websites and apps, identify owners, and find where ads have run. It’s the latest in our series about investigating digital ads.

We also published the Indicator guide to investigating crypto transactions, authored by professional crypto tracer Tom Caliendo. He walked through using free tools to triage an address, connect addresses to the same owner, and follow funds through the blockchain.

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British Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the UN General Assembly that he has instructed his security chiefs to start work on a National Centre for Information Defence. Pointing to Russian influence operations as the motivation for the new agency, Burnham said the Centre would “detect, attribute and disrupt … hostile state information attacks.”

I couldn’t track down specifics about the Centre’s structure, but Burnham’s description closely mirrors the role of France’s VIGINUM. Established in 2021, it is primarily focused on countering foreign manipulation and protecting national security, and much of its public reporting has focused on Russian operations.

Olga Belogolova — who worked on disrupting influence operations at Meta and is now a faculty member at Johns Hopkins — welcomed the announcement. “In my study of how nations structure their response to influence operations, I have found that central organization of these efforts (as basic as that seems) is pretty key to doing this work right,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

Full Fact called the unit “an important step towards defending information resilience.” But the British fact-checkers also warned that the National Centre for Information Defence’s focus on foreign manipulation “is too narrow.” It urged the government to ensure the unit will “collaborate effectively with civil society experts and be fully independent and accountable to Parliament.”

Alicia Wanless, director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was equally measured. “Coordination is always a good start,” Wanless told Indicator. “But challenges within an information ecosystem are often more than just a hard ‘information’ problem alone. Adversaries use hybrid warfare to probe at the seams - from undersea cables, to telecoms, digital media, and citizens. And much of what makes citizens so susceptible are often surrounding socio-economic issues, rather than the messaging to which they’re exposed.”

According to Wanless, “for the National Centre for Information Defence to be effective, it needs to put the analysis and coordination at the level of the overall information ecosystem.”

📍 William Yeates, the first Australian man to be charged under the country’s 2024 deepfake porn laws, apologized in court to his target, saying “my actions were repulsive and will continue to plague my mind for as long as I breathe.” His defense attributed the actions partly to the 20-year-old’s autism and his desire to fit in among an online community inspired by Andrew Tate.

📍 Seoul National University is applying pixel-level alterations to graduation photos in an effort to disrupt potential efforts to turn them into deepfake nudes (h/t Henry Ajder). The technology is provided free of charge by an alumni-led company called StealCut. When I spoke to experts about this type of defense last year, they warned me that it was “brittle.” But it’s good to see universities take the threat seriously. — Alexios

📍 X sued two users for allegedly running a network of fake bitcoin news accounts and manipulating engagement to boost their payout under the company’s Creator Revenue Sharing program.

📍 Reuters reported that “a German court has ruled that Meta is liable for fake advertisements posted by third parties ​on its Instagram and Facebook platforms, and ordered the ‌U.S. tech giant to remove such content and pay damages.”

📍 A false US intelligence analysis of a Chinese ship’s cargo that “almost started a war” was partly produced using an AI chatbot, according to four sources who spoke to CNN.

📍 US officials and security researchers told the New York Times that they detected the first AI agent-driven influence operations run by Iranian and Chinese state actors. According to the report, the agents “autonomously opened networks of fake accounts on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok […] then rapidly seeded the fake accounts with false posts about politics and current events to sway opinions and inflame issues.”

Many in the Indicator community will have met or heard of Eoghan Sweeney, who spent many years training journalists on verification and OSINT techniques. Sadly, Eoghan was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. His friends have set up a Gofundme to help support his family.

📍 Henk van Ess went on a tool-launching tear this week.

📍 Eitan Livne updated his username search tool, “adding several alt-tech networks and niche communities including Gab, Minds, Hexbear, and others.” Try it here.

📍 Digga is a free domain research tool. It pulls DNS info, subdomains, WHOIS, SSL cert, and more. Nice, clean interface. (via Saad Sarraj.)

📍 Mapa Societario is a free tool for visualizing Spanish corporate networks. Search for a Spanish company or officer and it visualizes connections. More info here.

📍 My OSINT Training added two bookmarklets to its ever-expanding (and useful!) collection. One is a “a TikTok Media downloader to allow you to save local copies of photos and videos.” The other extracts content from a site’s root-level and .well-known files, including robots.txt, security.txt, ads.txt, app-ads.txt and more. Read more on their blog.

📍 SpiderFoot.tools is a web-based version of the popular OSINT tool, which requires you to run Python (via Logan Woodward)

📍 The OSINT Newsletter published a guide on how to use Telagogo, a Telegram search tool.

📍 Shaya Laughlin of OCCRP wrote, “How to Track Down People Who Don't Want to Be Found.”

📍 OpenOwnership also launched an interesting resource this week: the Beneficial Ownership Transparency (BOT) Evidence Centre. It’s “a collection of research resources and other examples that show how beneficial ownership reforms lead to action and impact.”

📍 The University of Southern California is hosting the second Open Source Journalism Conference on Oct. 9 and 10 in Los Angeles. There’s a conference track and training track. Topics include using open sources and satellite imagery for uncovering data about global nuclear forces, and using remote sensing data to investigate a mass grave. Info and registration.

📍 The Misinformation Speaker Series from the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy (IIID) at Northeastern University has a few free talks coming up:

📍 University of Zurich postdoc Sacha Altay used Claude to create an interactive dashboard of studies about the reach of misinformation. Read his preprint here.

📍 In an admirably rapid preprint, Yuwei Chuai of the University of Luxembourg and colleagues estimated the impact of X’s location transparency feature, which was rolled out last year. The study found that accounts claiming to be US-based but revealed to be posting from other locations reduced their overall activity and sent fewer toxic replies to US accounts.(Craig looked at how investigators can make use of X’s “About this account” information when it first launched.)

📍 The African Digital Democracy Observatory revealed the infrastructure used to recruit foreigners — usually via deceptive means — to fight for Russia in Ukraine.

📍 Maldita documented a global effort pushing the false narrative that many countries ‘abandoned’ the dollar and adopted the yuan in their trade with China. Several of the pages pushing the claim posed as media outlets.

📍 Danish public media outlet DR identified a Danish child and a Swedish 24-year-old in ads for AI nudifiers that ran on Meta.

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