Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

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Wow. What a high value target. [0]

I mean. I get that low rent actors will use low rent services to try to generate political garbage. Is there any evidence that this is actually having a measurable or meaningful impact?

Who exactly is fooled by these sites? And is it the sites that are the problem or the relative lack of sophistication in American education when it comes to political corruption?

[0]: https://niothinker.com/

The only thing noteworthy about this is how small-scale this is, and that the perpetrators don't even bother/have the means to set up their own infrastructure.

The linked PDF (Storm-2035 [1]) from Microsoft is more detailed and interesting than the blog post. However, what's missing from the reports is how they detected those operations and how they tied them to different groups. There's a lot of claims being made without showing all of the supporting evidence.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, they likely want to keep their detection methods secret to make circumvention more difficult. And it all sounds totally plausible of course. But at the same time, a degree of skepticism is warranted because Microsoft has a huge incentive to fearmonger about AI so they can lock it down and capture the market. And what better way is there than to use the usual bogeymen to do so.

[1] https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcor...

Having worked at Microsoft for almost a decade, I remember chatting with their security people plenty after meetings. One interesting thing I learned is that Microsoft (and all the other top tech companies presumably) are under constant Advanced Persistent Threat from state actors. From literal secret agents getting jobs and working undercover for a decade+ to obtain seniority, to physical penetration attempts (some buildings on MS campus used to have armed security, before Cloud server farms were a thing!).

Microsoft is one of the few companies that goes toe to toe with world governments every day of the year.

And I imagine balancing that next to all the engineers who demand admin access everywhere is a royal pain!

Although the best Government VS Business story I heard was during intern orientation at Boeing about French agents breaking into Boeing employee's hotel rooms during a conference in France while the employees were out to dinner, and going through laptops. One of the employees returned earlier than expected, and the men in suits shut the laptop, turned around and walked out of the room w/o saying anything!