Moldova is facing a tide of disinformation unprecedented in complexity and aggression, the head of a new center meant to combat it tells WIRED. And platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and YouTube could do more.

A TikTok video of actor Brian Baumgartner, from the American version of _The Office_, calling for the overthrow of the president of a small European country was an early sign that this would be no ordinary election.

Late last year, Baumgartner appeared among a lineup of American celebrities addressing Maia Sandu, the current, pro-European president of Moldova and proclaiming in bad Russian: “We, Hollywood stars, support the people of Moldova in their desire to overthrow you, Sandu.” These weren’t deepfakes. Instead the videos—which researchers suggested were part of a pro-Kremlin influence operation—were commissioned on Cameo, the app that lets anyone buy personalized greetings from celebrities. Neither Cameo nor Baumgartner’s representatives replied to WIRED’s request for comment.

For years, Moldova—a country similar in size to the US state of Maryland, sandwiched between the EU and Ukraine—has complained of Russian meddling. But more recently, as this former Soviet state prepares for a pivotal presidential vote and referendum on whether to join the EU, the country has become a cautionary tale about how the world’s biggest social media platforms can be exploited to create and fund a complex disinformation operation that sows discord around some of a society’s most divisive subjects.

Since war broke out in neighboring Ukraine two years ago, bots have been scouring the Moldovan internet, searching for authentic content to boost to wide audiences, such as videos of Ukrainian-refugees behaving badly. Then ordinary Moldovans complained their Facebook feeds were being inundated with political, often anti-government ads launched by pages with Vietnamese names. A year later, researchers estimated Meta had earned at least $200,000 from a pro-Kremlin ad campaign targeting Moldova alone. Russia’s foreign ministry did not reply to WIRED’s request to comment.

“It’s unprecedented in terms of complexity,” says Ana Revenco, Moldova’s former interior minister, now in charge of the country’s new Center for Strategic Communication and Combating Disinformation. What’s happening in Moldova on Facebook, Telegram, TikTok, and YouTube, she believes, carries a warning for the rest of the world. “This shows us our collective vulnerability,” she says. “Platforms are not only active here. If \[Russia\] can use them here, they can use them everywhere.”

Ahead of the vote on Sunday, accounts linked to Russia have reached new levels of aggression, Revenco says. “They activate accounts that have been created long ago and have been on standby,” she explains. “They are engaging bots, and they're synchronizing posts across multiple platforms.”

The EU referendum is a pivotal moment for Moldova. On Sunday, voters will face a yes or no choice on whether their country should enshrine its intention to eventually join the EU in its constitution and allow President Sandu to seek closer ties with the bloc, a move prompted by the war in Ukraine. A yes vote “would create the legal guarantee for the country to move towards the European Union, irrespective of governments in the future,” says Iulian Groza, executive director of the Institute for European Policies and Reforms, a nonprofit that wants to accelerate Moldova’s integration into Europe.

Polls suggest 55 percent of Moldovans support joining the EU. But more than one-third of eligible voters must turn up at the polling stations for the vote to be valid. That means pro-Kremlin forces in the country are encouraging people not to vote at all on Sunday, says Groza. “Those who campaign to boycott the vote, basically campaign for the referendum not to pass.”

Revenco believes there is evidence that Russia is behind the disorientating amount of online activity. “Police investigations throughout the last two years clearly saw the connection with the organized criminal groups, including those who are on the international sanctions list,” she says. “This investigation traces their connections indeed to Russia, including the military ecosystem, banking ecosystem, and financial, including those banks that are also on the international sanctions list.”

In October, police announced the seizure of piles of cash and mobile phones they linked to organizations associated with Ilan Shor, a fugitive Moldovan oligarch, living in exile in Russia. Police said these affiliates were preparing to organize vote-buying through Telegram—an allegation Shor called an “absurd spectacle.” On Telegram, bots have been offering up to $280 to people who post on Facebook against joining the EU. “They are outsourcing disinformation,” says Victoria Olari, research assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who is based in Moldova’s capital, Chișinău. “They're being paid to make posts for their friends, for their close circle of people.”

Olari described the Telegram bot as an example of how brazen Russia had become in Moldova. "This is the first time Russia is not hiding anymore; they are doing this openly,” she says. Government officials claim Russia spent around €50 million ($54.3 million) on election interference last year, with the amount expected to more than double by the end of 2024, according to Revenco.

Revenco says her team has been trying to reach out to social media platforms about the problems. “Communication is much better than, let's say, one year ago.” Yet there is still room for the platforms to do much more, she says.

The narratives she sees circulating are designed to increase anti-EU sentiment, pro-Russia sentiment, but also anti-Ukrainian sentiment, she adds. “AI is used in order to multiply the messages and reach out to a greater audience in a short time.” Revenco did not provide specific examples, but a deepfake video featuring President Sandu has been circulating on Telegram, according to think tank Watchdog MD, even as the polls suggest Sandu will be reelected this weekend.

Earlier this month, Meta said it had removed Facebook and Instagram accounts centered around a dozen fictitious, Russian-language news brands. The fake accounts behind this activity posted original content, including cartoons and criticism of President Sandu, Meta said in a statement. “The operators also posted about offering money and giveaways, including food and concert tickets, if people in Moldova would follow them on social media or make graffiti with the campaign’s brand names.” Telegram, TikTok parent Bytedance, and YouTube parent Alphabet did not respond to WIRED’s questions about the steps they’d taken to limit disinformation in Moldova ahead of the vote.

Although Telegram did remove accounts linked to Shor earlier this month, at the authorities’ request, Revenco does not seem impressed by the platforms’ efforts overall. “The fact that \[disinformation\] continues to be present and very creative in terms of using various capabilities of these networks once again proves that the efforts undertaken so far are not sufficient.”

The Disinformation Warning Coming From the Edge of Europe

Sixty-five years ago, the Army's leaders unveiled its “ultimate weapon” for the age of atomic warfare. Here’s how the service’s vision stands up to today's reality.

Then there’s the matter of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), the Army’s futuristic “smart” goggles. Currently based on a ruggedized version of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 augmented reality headset, the IVAS is both night vision goggles and futuristic heads-up display, capable of feeding sensor inputs into a soldier’s line of sight. The Army has long experimented with helmet-mounted displays for decades as part of various “future warrior” programs, and the IVAS hasn’t been immune to the pitfalls of previous efforts—namely, complaints from soldiers about “mission-affecting physical impairments” like headache, nausea, and discomfort associated with prolonged use. And the future of the long-delayed headset now appears uncertain anyway: According to Breaking Defense, the service may end up going back to the drawing board with a new primary contractor for the sophisticated system as part of its IVAS Next initiative after auditing its existing night vision goggle capabilities. Still, between the ENVG-B and IVAS, helmet-mounted night vision devices have progressed far beyond anything Sawicki’s chain of command had previously imagined.

**Armor Up**

The bulletproof vest and camouflage suit combination that Sawicki donned for his AUSA debut, referred to in contemporaneous publications as “layered nylon armor” and “layered nylon vest,” is actually a bit closer to modern Army personal protective equipment than the flak jackets that were accompanying soldiers downrange during the Vietnam War. Currently under development, the Soldier Protection System (SPS) offers modern soldiers a “lightweight modular, scalable and tailorable suite of protective equipment,” according to the Army’s description. What this really means is that the protective ensemble comes in several different pieces that work together to maximize soldier survivability without impairing mobility; in terms of body armor, this refers primarily to the soft armor Torso and Extremity Protection subsystem and the hard armor Vital Torso Protection subsystem that, using reinforced ceramic plates, offer improved ballistic protection against small arms fire.

Protecting soldiers from bullets is one thing, but protecting them from the effects of nuclear explosions, as Army leaders told The New York Times Sawicki’s suit would, is another thing entirely—at least, in terms of equipment. While the well-worn Mission Oriented Protective Posture (MOPP) ensemble has been safeguarding Americans service members against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats for years, it’s an entirely separate system of personal protective gear rather than one integrated into the SPS or the standard-issue Army Combat Uniform. And while the 1959 design calls for specially designed “‘welded’ combat boots” and “molded plastic gloves” to help protect soldiers on an irradiated battlefield, modern troops must, unfortunately, go into battle with their Army Regulation 670-1-authorized boots and tactical gloves, apart from what’s in their MOPP kit. Then again, if the nukes do start flying, nobody will survive long enough for ground combat anyway.

**Bullet Time**

While the 1959 “soldier of tomorrow” appears armed with an M14, advances in firearms technology have long since left the beloved battle rifle in the dust. The Army began replacing the M14 with the lighter-weight 5.56-mm M16 assault rifle in the late 1960s, which was itself replaced by the shorter-barreled M4 carbine during the Global War on Terror in the 2000s. Replacing the M16 and M4 family of rifles has proven difficult in the past, but it’s safe to say that the promises from Army brass in 1959 of a lighter standard-issue rifle for soldiers have, for the most part, come true in the intervening decades—even if the new XM7 rifle, recently adopted under the service’s Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) program, is actually noticeably heavier than the M4.

So, too, has the promise of “new high-velocity bullets.” While the Army in the early 2000s fielded the 5.56-mm M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round for improved performance over the standard M855 ammo previously adopted in the 1980s, the service undertook a major small arms study in 2017 to determine whether soldiers required a different caliber ammunition to deal with the sudden proliferation of body armor among adversaries. The study determined that the Army’s next rifle should come chambered in 6.8 mm, which would purportedly offer significantly improved performance at range compared to both 5.56-mm and 7.62-mm rounds. From there, the Army ended up selecting Sig Sauer to produce its two 6.8mm NGSW systems in 2022, weapons the service began officially fielding earlier this year. It may have taken several decades, but the Army’s new high-velocity round is finally here.

**Rocket Man**

While certain elements of Sawicki’s combat kit are clearly represented in recent military innovations, others simply never came to fruition. The automatic foxhole-digging charges, for example, never materialized as an effective replacement for the beloved handheld entrenching tool, despite their prevalence among military futurists at the time. But if there’s one vision that has persisted in military and defense circles, it’s that of jetpack-equipped troops.

The Defense Department has pursued the militarized jetpack for decades, starting with research and development in the 1950s and culminating in October 1961 with the successful demonstration of Bell Aerosystems’s Small Rocket Lift Device (or, colloquially, the “Bell Rocket Belt”) for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Army ended up abandoning development of the Rocket Belt over fuel constraints that limited its potential tactical applications, but US military planners would revisit the concept time and again in subsequent decades.

What the US Army’s 1959 ‘Soldier of Tomorrow’ Got Right About the Future of Warfare

So much jamming is taking place in northeastern Norway, regulators no longer want to know.

From the ground, northeastern Norway might look like fjord country, peppered with neat red houses and dissected by snowmobile tours through the winter. But for pilots flying above, the region has become a danger zone for GPS jamming.

The jamming in the region of Finnmark is so constant, Norwegian authorities decided last month they would no longer log when and where it happens—accepting these disturbance signals as the new normal.

Nicolai Gerrard, senior engineer at NKOM, the country’s communications authority, says his organization no longer counts the jamming incidents. “It has unfortunately developed into an unwanted normal situation that should not be there. Therefore, the \[Norwegian authority in charge of the airports\] are not interested in continuous updates on something that is happening all the time.”

Pilots meanwhile, still have to adapt, usually when they are above 6,000 feet in the air. “We experience this almost every day,” says Odd Thomassen, a captain and senior safety adviser at the Norwegian airline Widerøe. He claims jamming typically lasts between six and eight minutes at a time.

A map of GPS jamming over Europe on 17 October 2024.

Map: Courtesy of Benoit Figuet, Michael Felux and Raphael Monstein of SkAI Data Services and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Data sourced from the OpenSky Network.

When a plane gets jammed, warnings flash on cockpit computers and the GPS system used to warn pilots of a potential collision with terrain, such as mountains, stops working. Pilots are still able to navigate without GPS if they can communicate with ground stations nearby, explains Thomassen. But they are left with an eerie sense they are flying without the support of the latest technology. “You're basically \[going\] 30 years back in time,” he says.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, jamming has dramatically increased across Europe’s eastern edges, and authorities in Baltic countries openly blame Russia for overloading GPS receivers with benign signals, meaning they can no longer operate. In April, a Finnair plane trying to land in Tartu, Estonia, was forced to turn back 15 minutes before landing because it could not get an accurate GPS signal.

Over the past decade, GPS systems have been considered so dependable that many smaller, more remote airports have started to rely on it completely instead of maintaining more expensive ground-based equipment, says Andy Spencer, a pilot and international flight ops specialist at OpsGroup, a member organization for pilots and others in the airline industry.

“In Norway, you're probably looking at a lot of airports that only have GPS approaches,” he says, referring to the phase of the flight where planes descend to the runway. “If there is an issue with GPS signals, these airports can become off limits.”

In Finland, even tractors capable of operating automatically have been disrupted. In May, the Finnish transport agency said the problem had intensified since Ukraine began targeting Russian energy infrastructure with drones, suggesting the jamming could be a side effect of Russia’s new drone defense systems. That same month, the agency changed its guidelines so that airlines have to report only GPS interference that has “exceptional effects.”

NKOM also attributes jamming above northeastern Norway to Russia. “In Finnmark, the interference is Russian jamming of several GNSS bands \[systems that help satellites and ground stations communicate\], not only GPS, originating from some place on the Russian side of the border,” Gerrard tells WIRED. Pilots aren’t the only people affected, he stresses. Across Norway, there have been cases of fishing boats unable to carry out certain tasks and diggers on construction sites no longer able to dig precisely, he says. The Russian embassy in Oslo did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

NKOM’s decision to stop tracking jamming in Finnmark sets a dangerous precedent, says Melanie Garson, a professor focused on international conflict resolution at University College London. “By not reacting, how do you enforce a deterrent effect?” she asks, adding it is still unclear whether the government is going to find a solution to the jamming problem or leave it to the industries that are affected.

NKOM does try to “eliminate” GPS jamming when its source is inside Norwegian territory, says spokesperson Gerrard. The agency is also among several government departments that organizes the annual event Jammerfest, held on the Norwegian island of Andøya, to experiment with countermeasures. Since 2022, representatives from industry and government travel to the arctic circle to test how their systems respond to jamming and the more serious GPS spoofing, where GPS signals are faked to deceive a plane or other device about its own location.

Yet Widerøe pilots are concerned that this issue might feel remote to the American companies that make a lot of the equipment inside their planes. They believe it is the American Navstar satellite system being targeted because other devices like iPads—which can pick up signals from multiple satellite constellations—still work throughout periods of jamming.

“The providers of the navigation computers, they are mainly American,” says Rolf Fossgård, deputy VP of flight operations at Widerøe. He’s worried that if American businesses are not affected themselves, they might not be motivated to upgrade their systems to be jamming-resistant. “For a lot of European operators or Middle East operators, they are in need of this kind of equipment.”

It's unclear how the situation in the skies above Finnmark is going to evolve. Since 2022, most interference has hit planes above 6,000 feet—suggesting the device that is causing the jamming is located on the ground, and that the more sensitive part of a plane's journey, at lower altitudes, is protected by the curvature of the Earth.

But in April, Thomassen claims, he encountered his first case of jamming as he attempted to land. Flying into Båtsfjord, on Norway’s northern tip, his plane suffered jamming as it approached the runway. “We were able to land just fine based on visual contact with the airport,” he explains, adding that his company Widerøe is yet to verify why this case of jamming took place at such low altitudes.

Luckily the surrounding area is very flat, he says. “Norway is a mountainous country, so if the jamming were in other parts of the country, operational impact would be significant.”

GPS Jamming Is Screwing With Norwegian Planes

Security researchers created an algorithm that turns a malicious prompt into a set of hidden instructions that could send a user's personal information to an attacker.

When talking with a chatbot, you might inevitably give up your personal information—your name, for instance, and maybe details about where you live and work, or your interests. The more you share with a large language model, the greater the risk of it being abused if there’s a security flaw.

A group of security researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore are now revealing a new attack that secretly commands an LLM to gather your personal information—including names, ID numbers, payment card details, email addresses, mailing addresses, and more—from chats and send it directly to a hacker.

The attack, named Imprompter by the researchers, uses an algorithm to transform a prompt given to the LLM into a hidden set of malicious instructions. An English-language sentence telling the LLM to find personal information someone has entered and send it to the hackers is turned into what appears to be a random selection of characters.

However, in reality, this nonsense-looking prompt instructs the LLM to find a user’s personal information, attach it to a URL, and quietly send it back to a domain owned by the attacker—all without alerting the person chatting with the LLM. The researchers detail Imprompter in a paper published today.

“The effect of this particular prompt is essentially to manipulate the LLM agent to extract personal information from the conversation and send that personal information to the attacker’s address,” says Xiaohan Fu, the lead author of the research and a computer science PhD student at UCSD. “We hide the goal of the attack in plain sight.”

The eight researchers behind the work tested the attack method on two LLMs, LeChat by French AI giant Mistral AI and Chinese chatbot ChatGLM. In both instances, they found they could stealthily extract personal information within test conversations—the researchers write that they have a “nearly 80 percent success rate.”

Mistral AI tells WIRED it has fixed the security vulnerability—with the researchers confirming the company disabled one of its chat functionalities. A statement from ChatGLM stressed it takes security seriously but did not directly comment on the vulnerability.

**Hidden Meanings**

Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked a generative AI boom following its release at the end of 2022, researchers and hackers have been consistently finding security holes in AI systems. These often fall into two broad categories: jailbreaks and prompt injections.

Jailbreaks can trick an AI system into ignoring built-in safety rules by using prompts that override the AI’s settings. Prompt injections, however, involve an LLM being fed a set of instructions—such as telling them to steal data or manipulate a CV—contained within an external data source. For instance, a message embedded on a website may contain a hidden prompt that an AI will ingest if it summarizes the page.

Prompt injections are considered one of generative AI’s biggest security risks and are not easy to fix. The attack type particularly worries security experts as LLMs are increasingly turned into agents that can carry out tasks on behalf of a human, such as booking flights or being connected to an external database to provide specific answers.

The Imprompter attacks on LLM agents start with a natural language prompt (as shown above) that tells the AI to extract all personal information, such as names and IDs, from the user’s conversation. The researchers’ algorithm generates an obfuscated version (also above) that has the same meaning to the LLM, but to humans looks like a series of random characters.

“Our current hypothesis is that the LLMs learn hidden relationships between tokens from text and these relationships go beyond natural language,” Fu says of the transformation. “It is almost as if there is a different language that the model understands.”

The result is that the LLM follows the adversarial prompt, gathers all the personal information, and formats it into a Markdown image command—attaching the personal information to a URL owned by the attackers. The LLM visits this URL to try and retrieve the image and leaks the personal information to the attacker. The LLM responds in the chat with a 1x1 transparent pixel that can’t be seen by the users.

The researchers say that if the attack were carried out in the real world, people could be socially engineered into believing the unintelligible prompt might do something useful, such as improve their CV. The researchers point to numerous websites that provide people with prompts they can use. They tested the attack by uploading a CV to conversations with chatbots, and it was able to return the personal information contained within the file.

Earlence Fernandes, an assistant professor at UCSD who was involved in the work, says the attack approach is fairly complicated as the obfuscated prompt needs to identify personal information, form a working URL, apply Markdown syntax, and not give away to the user that it is behaving nefariously. Fernandes likens the attack to malware, citing its ability to perform functions and behavior in ways the user might not intend.

“Normally you could write a lot of computer code to do this in traditional malware,” Fernandes says. “But here I think the cool thing is all of that can be embodied in this relatively short gibberish prompt.”

A spokesperson for Mistral AI says the company welcomes security researchers helping it to make its products safer for users. “Following this feedback, Mistral AI promptly implemented the proper remediation to fix the situation,” the spokesperson says. The company treated the issue as one with “medium severity,” and its fix blocks the Markdown renderer from operating and being able to call an external URL through this process, meaning external image loading isn’t possible.

Fernandes believes Mistral AI’s update is likely one of the first times an adversarial prompt example has led to an LLM product being fixed, rather than the attack being stopped by filtering out the prompt. However, he says, limiting the capabilities of LLM agents could be “counterproductive” in the long run.

Meanwhile, a statement from the creators of ChatGLM says the company has security measures in place to help with user privacy. “Our model is secure, and we have always placed a high priority on model security and privacy protection,” the statement says. “By open-sourcing our model, we aim to leverage the power of the open-source community to better inspect and scrutinize all aspects of these models’ capabilities, including their security.”

**A “High-Risk Activity”**

Dan McInerney, the lead threat researcher at security company Protect AI, says the Imprompter paper “releases an algorithm for automatically creating prompts that can be used in prompt injection to do various exploitations, like PII exfiltration, image misclassification, or malicious use of tools the LLM agent can access.” While many of the attack types within the research may be similar to previous methods, McInerney says, the algorithm ties them together. “This is more along the lines of improving automated LLM attacks than undiscovered threat surfaces in them.”

However, he adds that as LLM agents become more commonly used and people give them more authority to take actions on their behalf, the scope for attacks against them increases. “Releasing an LLM agent that accepts arbitrary user input should be considered a high-risk activity that requires significant and creative security testing prior to deployment,” McInerney says.

For companies, that means understanding the ways an AI agent can interact with data and how they can be abused. But for individual people, similarly to common security advice, you should consider just how much information you’re providing to any AI application or company, and if using any prompts from the internet, be cautious of where they come from.

This Prompt Can Make an AI Chatbot Identify and Extract Personal Details From Your Chats

The US has accused two brothers of being part of the hacker group Anonymous Sudan, which allegedly went on a wild cyberattack spree that hit hundreds of targets—and, for one of the two men, even put lives at risk.

For hackers seeking to maximize chaos, so-called denial-of-service attacks that knock targets offline with waves off junk traffic are typically more of a blunt cudgel than a weapon of mass destruction. But according to the US Department of Justice, a pair of Sudanese brothers allegedly behind the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan launched a spree of those crude cyberattacks that was both powerful and cruel enough in its choice of victims—extending to dozens of hospitals in multiple countries, Israel’s missile alert system, and hundreds of other digital services—that one of them is now being charged not only with criminal hacking but also with the rare added allegation of seeking to cause physical injury and death.

On Wednesday the DOJ unsealed charges against brothers Ahmed and Alaa Omer, who allegedly launched a punishing bombardment of more than 35,000 distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks against hundreds of organizations, taking down websites and other networked systems as part of both their own ideologically motivated hacktivism, as a means of extortion, or on behalf of clients of a cyberattack-for-hire service they ran for profit. According to US prosecutors and the FBI, their victims included Microsoft's Azure cloud services, OpenAI's ChatGPT, video game and media companies, airports, and even the Pentagon, the FBI, and the Department of Justice itself.

In image of Ahmed Omer’s passport released by the FBI.

“We declare cyber war on the United States,” Ahmed Omer posted in a message to Anonymous Sudan's Telegram channel in April of last year, according to the indictment. "The United States will be our primary target.”

Anonymous Sudan also targeted hospitals in the US, Denmark, Sweden, and India. In at least one case in February, prosecutors say, the attacks on Cedars-Sinai Health Systems in Los Angeles caused hours of downtime for health care services that diverted patients to other hospitals. In that Los Angeles incident, the Justice Department claims that one of the two hackers explicitly sought to cause potentially deadly harm.

“Bomb our hospitals in Gaza, we shut down yours too, eye for eye,” Ahmed Omer allegedly wrote on Telegram in the midst of the attack. As a result of those hospital attacks, prosecutors are bringing charges against Ahmed Ohmer that carry a potential life sentence, which prosecutors describe as the most severe criminal charges ever brought against a hacker accused of denial-of-service attacks.

In earlier cases, US authorities claim, the hackers used cyberattacks to disrupt Israel's Tzeva Adom or “Code Red” missile alert app, tearing the system offline in the midst of deadly rocket attacks by Hamas, including during Hamas's attacks on October 7th of last year.

An Anonymous Sudan image included in the FBI’s complaint against the Omer brothers.

“The actions taken by this group were callous and brazen,” Martin Estrada, a US attorney for the Central District of California and lead prosecutor in the case, told reporters in a conference call. “This group was motivated by their extremist ideology, essentially a Sudanese nationalist ideology.”

Despite publicizing its charges against the two men, Estrada declined to make clear the whereabouts of the two alleged hackers—though he noted that they are in custody. An FBI affidavit accompanying the indictment states that an FBI agent, Elliott Peterson, interviewed both of the Omer brothers and that Ahmed Omer admitted to being an Anonymous Sudan administrator.

Law enforcement agencies also appear to have carried out an operation to take down Anonymous Sudan's infrastructure in March of this year, which prevented the group from carrying out further attacks. The Telegram channel where the group boasted of its targeting and advertised its for-profit attack service went entirely silent around that time and has since ceased to exist. “Anonymous Sudan in name and in operation is effectively dead,” says Chad Seaman, a principal security researcher for tech firm Akamai and a member of Big Pipes, a working group focused on DDoS that closely tracked the group and collaborated with law enforcement in its investigation.

From mid-2023 until that takedown, Anonymous Sudan distinguished itself among self-proclaimed hacktivists with a series of shockingly large and high-profile DDoS attacks. In June of last year, for instance, it pummeled Microsoft's Azure cloud services for days, knocking it intermittently offline and demanding a million-dollar ransom to stop. It also repeatedly took down OpenAI's ChatGPT in December and wrote on Telegram that it was targeting the company due to the pro-Israeli posts of one of its employees.

Anonymous Sudan has at times, in fact, appeared to have formal or informal ties to anti-Israel forces: According to prosecutors, it launched disruptive cyberattacks that targeted Israel's Tzeva Adom missile alert system on October 7, 2023, in the midst of attacks by the militant wing of Hamas that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. As Israel's ensuing bombardment and invasion of the Gaza strip killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians over the months that followed, Anonymous Sudan frequently described the motivation for its attacks in its Telegram posts as the defense of Palestinians.

In December of 2023, for instance, Anonymous Sudan took OpenAI's ChatGPT offline with a sustained series of DDoS attacks in response to the company's executive Tal Broda vocally supporting the Israel Defense Forces’ missile attacks in Gaza. “More! No mercy! IDF don't stop!” Broda had written on X over a photo of a devastated urban landscape in Gaza, and in another post denied the existence of Palestine.

“We will continue targeting ChatGPT until the genocide supporter, Tal Broda, is fired and ChatGPT stops having dehumanizing views of Palestinians," Anonymous Sudan responded in a Telegram post explaining its attacks on OpenAI.

Still, Anonymous Sudan's true goals haven't always seemed entirely ideological, Akamai's Seaman says. The group has also offered to sell access to its DDoS infrastructure to other hackers: Telegram posts from the group as recently as March offered the use of its DDoS service, known as Godzilla or Skynet, for $2,500 a month. That suggests that even its attacks that appeared to be politically motivated may have been intended, at least in part, as marketing for its moneymaking side, Seaman argues.

“They seem to have thought, ‘We can get involved, really put a hurting on people, and market this service at the same time,’” Seaman says. He notes that, in the group's anti-Israel, pro-Palestine focus following the October 7 attacks, “there’s definitely an ideological thread in there. But the way it weaved through the different victims is something that maybe only the perpetrators of the attack fully understand.”

At times, Anonymous Sudan also hit Ukrainian targets, seemingly partnering with pro-Russian hacker groups like Killnet. That led some in the cybersecurity community to suspect that Anonymous Sudan was, in fact, a Russia-linked operation using its Sudanese identity as a front, given Russia's history of using hacktivism as false flag. The charges against Ahmed and Alaa Omer suggest that the group was, instead, authentically Sudanese in origin. But aside from its name, the group doesn't appear to have any clear ties to the original Anonymous hacker collective, which has been largely inactive for the last decade.

Aside from its targeting and politics, the group has distinguished itself through a relatively novel and effective technical approach, Akamai's Seaman says: Its DDoS service was built by gaining access to hundreds or possibly even thousands of virtual private servers—often-powerful machines offered by cloud services companies—by renting them with fraudulent credentials. It then used those machines to launch so-called layer 7 attacks, overwhelming web servers with requests for websites, rather than the lower-level floods of raw internet data requests that DDoS hackers have tended to use in the past. Anonymous Sudan and the customers of its DDoS services would then target victims with vast numbers of those layer 7 requests in parallel, sometimes using techniques called “multiplexing” or “pipelining” to simultaneously create multiple bandwidth demands on servers until they dropped offline.

For at least nine months, the group's technical power and brazen, unpredictable targeting made it a top concern for the anti-DDoS community, Seaman says—and for its many victims. “There was a lot of uncertainty about this group, what they were capable of, what their motivations were, why they targeted people,” says Seaman. “When Anonymous Sudan went away, there was a spike in curiosity and definitely a sigh of relief.”

The Justice Department's decision to level a criminal charge against Ahmed Omer that could lead to a life sentence for a denial-of-service attack may seem haphazard, given that state-sponsored cyberattacks and ransomware have often caused far more serious damage to health care networks, says Josh Corman, a researcher at the Institute for Security and Technology who has long focused on health care-targeted hacking. Corman says he's nonetheless encouraged to see prosecutors recognize that even crude cyberattacks can have serious—and even lethal—effects on victims.

“Yes, denial-of-service attacks can degrade and deny patent care to cause loss of life,” says Corman. “While this is the first, and it may seem arbitrary until we get more details, it could be heartening to see that we understand the outsize consequences of these attacks.”

_Updated 5 pm ET, October 16, 2024: While Anonymous Sudan is accused of launching thousands of attacks, the number of targets was in the hundreds. We've updated the story to clarify that distinction._

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This AI Tool Helped Convict People of Murder. Then Someone Took a Closer Look

Bots that “remove clothes” from images have run rampant on the messaging app, allowing people to create nonconsensual deepfake images even as lawmakers and tech companies try to crack down.

In early 2020, deepfake expert Henry Ajder uncovered one of the first Telegram bots built to “undress” photos of women using artificial intelligence. At the time, Ajder recalls, the bot had been used to generate more than 100,000 explicit photos—including those of children—and its development marked a “watershed” moment for the horrors deepfakes could create. Since then, deepfakes have become more prevalent, more damaging, and easier to produce.

Now, a WIRED review of Telegram communities involved with the explicit nonconsensual content has identified at least 50 bots that claim to create explicit photos or videos of people with only a couple of clicks. The bots vary in capabilities, with many suggesting they can “remove clothes” from photos while others claim to create images depicting people in various sexual acts.

The 50 bots list more than 4 million “monthly users” combined, according to WIRED's review of the statistics presented by each bot. Two bots listed more than 400,000 monthly users each, while another 14 listed more than 100,000 members each. The findings illustrate how widespread explicit deepfake creation tools have become and reinforce Telegram’s place as one of the most prominent locations where they can be found. However, the snapshot, which largely encompasses English-language bots, is likely a small portion of the overall deepfake bots on Telegram.

“We’re talking about a significant, orders-of-magnitude increase in the number of people who are clearly actively using and creating this kind of content,” Ajder says of the Telegram bots. “It is really concerning that these tools—which are really ruining lives and creating a very nightmarish scenario primarily for young girls and for women—are still so easy to access and to find on the surface web, on one of the biggest apps in the world.”

Explicit nonconsensual deepfake content, which is often referred to as nonconsensual intimate image abuse (NCII), has exploded since it first emerged at the end of 2017, with generative AI advancements helping fuel recent growth. Across the internet, a slurry of “nudify” and “undress” websites sit alongside more sophisticated tools and Telegram bots, and are being used to target thousands of women and girls around the world—from Italy’s prime minister to school girls in South Korea. In one recent survey, a reported 40 percent of US students were aware of deepfakes linked to their K-12 schools in the last year.

The Telegram bots identified by WIRED are supported by at least 25 associated Telegram channels—where people can subscribe to newsfeed-style updates—that have more than 3 million combined members. The Telegram channels alert people about new features provided by the bots and special offers on “tokens” that can be purchased to operate them, and often act as places where people using the bots can find links to new ones if they are removed by Telegram.

After WIRED contacted Telegram with questions about whether it allows explicit deepfake content creation on its platform, the company deleted the 75 bots and channels WIRED identified. The company did not respond to a series of questions or comment on why it had removed the channels.

Additional nonconsensual deepfake Telegram channels and bots later identified by WIRED show the scale of the problem. Several channel owners posted that their bots had been taken down, with one saying, “We will make another bot tomorrow.” Those accounts were also later deleted.

**Hiding in Plain Sight**

Telegram bots are, essentially, small apps that run inside of Telegram. They sit alongside the app’s channels, which can broadcast messages to an unlimited number of subscribers; groups where up to 200,000 people can interact; and one-to-one messages. Developers have created bots where people take trivia quizzes, translate messages, create alerts, or start Zoom meetings. They’ve also been co-opted for creating abusive deepfakes.

Due to the harmful nature of the deepfake tools, WIRED did not test the Telegram bots and is not naming specific bots or channels. While the bots had millions of monthly users, according to Telegram’s statistics, it is unclear how many images the bots may have been used to create. Some users, who could be in multiple channels and bots, may have created zero images; others could have created hundreds.

Many of the deepfake bots viewed by WIRED are clear about what they have been created to do. The bots’ names and descriptions refer to nudity and removing women’s clothes. “I can do anything you want about the face or clothes of the photo you give me,” the creators’ of one bot wrote. “Experience the shock brought by AI,” another says. Telegram can also show “similar channels” in its recommendation tool, helping potential users bounce between channels and bots.

Almost all of the bots require people to buy “tokens” to create images, and it is unclear if they operate in the ways they claim. As the ecosystem around deepfake generation has flourished in recent years, it has become a potentially lucrative source of income for those who create websites, apps, and bots. So many people are trying to use “nudify” websites that Russian cybercriminals, as reported by 404Media, have started creating fake websites to infect people with malware.

While the first Telegram bots, identified several years ago, were relatively rudimentary, the technology needed to create more realistic AI-generated images has improved—and some of the bots are hiding in plain sight.

One bot with more than 300,000 monthly users did not reference any explicit material in its name or landing page. However, once a user clicks to use the bot, it claims it has more than 40 options for images, many of which are highly sexual in nature. That same bot has a user guide, hosted on the web outside of Telegram, describing how to create the highest-quality images. Bot developers can require users to accept terms of service, which may forbid users from uploading images without the consent of the person depicted or images of children, but there appears to be little or no enforcement of these rules.

Another bot, which had more than 38,000 users, claimed people could send six images of the same man or woman—it is one of a small number that claims to create images of men—to “train” an AI model, which could then create new deepfake images of that individual. Once users joined one bot, it would present a menu of 11 “other bots” from the creators, likely to keep systems online and try to avoid removals.

“These types of fake images can harm a person’s health and well-being by causing psychological trauma and feelings of humiliation, fear, embarrassment, and shame,” says Emma Pickering, the head of technology-facilitated abuse and economic empowerment at Refuge, the UK’s largest domestic abuse organization. “While this form of abuse is common, perpetrators are rarely held to account, and we know this type of abuse is becoming increasingly common in intimate partner relationships.”

As explicit deepfakes have become easier to create and more prevalent, lawmakers and tech companies have been slow to stem the tide. Across the US, 23 states have passed laws to address nonconsensual deepfakes, and tech companies have bolstered some policies. However, apps that can create explicit deepfakes have been found in Apple and Google’s app stores, explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift were widely shared on X in January, and Big Tech sign-in infrastructure has allowed people to easily create accounts on deepfake websites.

Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s free expression project, says most major technology platforms now have policies prohibiting nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, with many of the biggest agreeing to principles to tackle deepfakes. “I would say that it’s actually not clear whether nonconsensual intimate image creation or distribution is prohibited on the platform,” Ruane says of Telegram’s terms of service, which are less detailed than other major tech platforms.

Telegram’s approach to removing harmful content has long been criticized by civil society groups, with the platform historically hosting scammers, extreme right-wing groups, and terrorism-related content. Since Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov was arrested and charged in France in August relating to a range of potential offenses, Telegram has started to make some changes to its terms of service and provide data to law enforcement agencies. The company did not respond to WIRED’s questions about whether it specifically prohibits explicit deepfakes.

**Execute the Harm**

Ajder, the researcher who discovered deepfake Telegram bots four years ago, says the app is almost uniquely positioned for deepfake abuse. “Telegram provides you with the search functionality, so it allows you to identify communities, chats, and bots,” Ajder says. “It provides the bot-hosting functionality, so it's somewhere that provides the tooling in effect. Then it’s also the place where you can share it and actually execute the harm in terms of the end result.”

In late September, several deepfake channels started posting that Telegram had removed their bots. It is unclear what prompted the removals. On September 30, a channel with 295,000 subscribers posted that Telegram had “banned” its bots, but it posted a new bot link for users to use. (The channel was removed after WIRED sent questions to Telegram.)

“One of the things that’s really concerning about apps like Telegram is that it is so difficult to track and monitor, particularly from the perspective of survivors,” says Elena Michael, the cofounder and director of #NotYourPorn, a campaign group working to protect people from image-based sexual abuse.

Michael says Telegram has been “notoriously difficult” to discuss safety issues with, but notes there has been some progress from the company in recent years. However, she says the company should be more proactive in moderating and filtering out content itself.

“Imagine if you were a survivor who’s having to do that themselves, surely the burden shouldn't be on an individual,” Michael says. “Surely the burden should be on the company to put something in place that's proactive rather than reactive.”

Millions of People Are Using Abusive AI ‘Nudify’ Bots on Telegram

“Passkeys,” the secure authentication mechanism built to replace passwords, are getting more portable and easier for organizations to implement thanks to new initiatives the FIDO Alliance announced on Monday.

The password-killing tech known as “passkeys” have proliferated over the past two years, developed by the tech industry association known as the FIDO Alliance as an easier and more secure authentication alternative. And although superseding any technology as entrenched as passwords is difficult, new features and resources launching this week are pushing passkeys toward a tipping point.

At the FIDO Alliance's Authenticate Conference in Carlsbad, California, on Monday, researchers are announcing two projects that will make passkeys easier for organizations to offer—and easier for everyone to use. One is a new technical specification called Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) that will make passkeys portable between digital ecosystems, a feature that users have increasingly demanded. The other is a website, called Passkey Central, where developers and system administrators can find resources like metrics and implementation guides that make it easier to add support for passkeys on existing digital platforms.

“To me, both announcements are part of the broader story of the industry working together to stop our dependence on passwords,” Andrew Shikiar, CEO of the FIDO Alliance, told WIRED ahead of Monday's announcements. “And when it comes to CXP, we have all these companies who are fierce competitors willing to collaborate on credential exchange."

CXP comprises a set of draft specifications developed by the FIDO Alliance's “Credential Provider Special Interest Group.” Development of technical standards can often be a fraught bureaucratic process, but the creation of CXP seems to have been positive and collaborative. Researchers from the password managers 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, NordPass, and Enpass all worked on CXP, as did those from the identity providers Okta as well as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and SK Telecom.

The specifications are significant for a few reasons. CXP was created for passkeys and is meant to address a longstanding criticism that passkeys could contribute to user lock-in by making it prohibitively difficult for people to move between operating system vendors and types of devices. In many ways, though, this problem already exists with passwords. Export features that allow you to move all of your passwords from one manager to another are often dangerously exposed and essentially just dump a list of all of your passwords into a plaintext file.

It's gotten much easier to sync passkeys across your devices through a single password manager, but CXP aims to standardize the technical process for securely transferring them between platforms so users are free—and safe—to roam the digital landscape. Importantly, while CXP was designed with passkeys in mind, it is really a specification that can be adapted to securely exchange other secrets as well, including passwords or other types of data.

“In the future, this could apply to mobile driver's licenses, say, or passports—any secrets that you want to export somewhere and import into another system,” Christiaan Brand, identity and security group product manager at Google, tells WIRED. “We've got most of the rough edges sanded down with passkeys, but one of the main pieces of negative feedback over the past year has been around portability and potential vendor lock-in. I think with this, we are signaling to the world that passkeys are growing up.”

The goal of the resource repository Passkey Central is similarly to help the ecosystem expand and mature. Product leads or security professionals who want to implement passkeys for their user base may need to make a business case to executives to get budget for the project. The FIDO Alliance is basically aiming to help them with the pitch—providing data and communications materials—and then support their rollout with prefab materials like implementation and roll-out guides, user experience and design guidelines, documentation around accessibility, and troubleshooting.

“We've made amazing progress on passkeys,” FIDO's Shikiar says. “Usability and user experience are pretty much there. But we do have a punch list and we’re actively working on it. Portability is an important feature on that list. And while the biggest brands on the planet are now using passkeys at scale, there’s a very long tail of companies that haven’t gotten started yet. So we want to offer resources and the assets they need to be successful."

Craig Newmark Philanthropies' Cyber Civil Defense coalition provides some funding to advance passkeys. In an interview with WIRED ahead of Monday's announcements, Newmark said he believes that passkeys can make a real difference both for the digital security of individual people and for internet security overall.

“There are a lot of vulnerable systems out there,” Newmark says. “You need to make it a lot harder for bad actors to defeat password schemes. You need to make everything more secure, and passkeys is part of that.”

The War on Passwords Is One Step Closer to Being Over

Plus: New details emerge in the National Public Data breach, Discord gets blocked in Russia and Turkey over alleged illegal activity on the platform, and more.

The Internet Archive is under attack. On top of multiple extinction-threatening lawsuits against the organization that created and maintains the Wayback Machine, hackers this week breached the Internet Archive, stole 31 million user account details, and defaced its website—all while archive.org struggled to stay online thanks to a barrage of distributed denial-of-service attacks. As of Friday, the site remained “temporarily offline.”

In a dark twist of fate, a judge this week cleared the way for the US Treasury Department to take possession of 69,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk Road dark web market; meanwhile, the former IRS investigator who personally seized the bitcoins, Tigran Gambaryan, remains in a Nigerian jail cell on charges related to the actions of his current employer, embattled crypto exchange Binance. Members of Congress and other officials have called for the US government to do more to ensure Gambaryan’s release given his direct role in a series of major criminal cases and in pioneering crypto-investigation techniques. As for those seized Silk Road bitcoins, they are now worth $4.4 billion and will likely be auctioned off.

Security researchers this week detailed a pernicious malware that worms its way into Linux machines and uses a variety of techniques to evade detection. Dubbed Perfctl, the malware hides itself by creating files that match those typically found within Linux instances, using tricks to prevent admin tools from recording its activities, and more. All of this is done with the goal of remaining on an infected machine to keep carrying out a variety of malicious activities. Researchers estimate that millions of Linux devices could be vulnerable.

Finally, we dissected the ways in which Google’s decision to _not_ kill third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome browser could continue to impact your privacy.

And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Police use of honeypots to catch cybercriminals red-handed is nothing new. But creating an entirely new cryptocurrency to catch pump-and-dump schemers? Now that’s something special. The US Department of Justice revealed this week that the FBI made a new Ethereum-based crypto token, NexFundAI, specifically to trick people who manipulate crypto markets and take them down.

While the investigation ultimately resulted in charges against 18 people and other entities for alleged fraud and crypto market manipulation, the blast radius of the scheme also impacted some regular retail investors who are not accused of any crimes, although US officials did not provide details about those investments. A US prosecutor involved in the case told reporters, however, that the investigation netted a total of $25 million in funds, which will be returned to investors. Trading on NexFundAI has since been disabled.

**National Public Data Files for Bankruptcy After Catastrophic Breach**

National Public Data, a data broker based in Florida, is having a bad year. In August, hackers published 2.9 billion records stolen from NPD last December that included names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and Social Security numbers—a giant trove the hackers claim impacted “the entire population of USA, CA, and UK.” Then came the inevitable lawsuits against NPD, which is now filing for bankruptcy. Those proceedings have revealed new details, including the fact that NPD is run by a single person, Salvatore Verini, Jr, who operated the business out of his home on around $2,500 worth of equipment. A document filed in a bankruptcy court by one of NPD’s debtors states that the breach may have impacted “hundreds of millions” of people.

**Russia and Turkey Block Discord**

Discord users in Russia and Turkey this week found they were suddenly unable to connect to the online chat application. Authorities in both countries later revealed that Discord had been blocked for allegedly facilitating illegal activity. Russia’s internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, said in a statement the block “is necessary to prevent the use of the messenger for terrorist and extremist purposes, the recruitment of citizens for their commission, the sale of drugs, in connection with the placement of illegal information.” Turkish authorities, meanwhile, banned the messaging app after a court decision involving child abuse material that was allegedly hosted on Discord servers. According to BleepingComputer, some Discord users in those countries were able to access the app using a VPN that routed their connections through foreign IP addresses—potentially good news for Russian troops who were reportedly disrupted by the block.

**Police Secretly Use Face Recognition Tech to Link People to Crimes**

Law enforcement use of face recognition technology to pin crimes on Americans is far more widespread than previously known, according to a newly published investigation by The Washington Post. Records obtained by the Post found that police in 15 states used face recognition tools in “more than 1,000 investigations over the past four years.” Despite its apparent widespread use, police departments frequently seek to hide their use of the technology, which has been found to inaccurately identify people who are then charged with crimes they did not commit. As an assistant public defender in Minnesota told Post reporters, police likely obscure their use of face recognition because they “want to avoid the litigation surrounding reliability of the technology.”

The FBI Made a Crypto Coin Just to Catch Fraudsters

Scammers in Southeast Asia are increasingly turning to AI, deepfakes, and dangerous malware in a way that makes their pig butchering operations even more convincing.

As digital scamming explodes in Southeast Asia, including so called “pig butchering” investment scams, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a comprehensive report this week with a dire warning about the rapid growth of this criminal ecosystem. Many digital scams have traditionally relied on social engineering, or tricking victims into giving away their money willingly, rather than leaning on malware or other highly technical methods. But researchers have increasingly sounded the alarm that scammers are incorporating generative AI content and deepfakes to expand the scale and effectiveness of their operations. And the UN report offers the clearest evidence yet that these high tech tools are turning an already urgent situation into a crisis.

In addition to buying written scripts to use with potential victims or relying on templates for malicious websites, attackers have increasingly been leaning on generative AI platforms to create communication content in multiple languages and deepfake generators that can create photos or even video of nonexistent people to show victims and enhance verisimilitude. Scammers have also been expanding their use of tools that can drain a victim’s cryptocurrency wallets, have been manipulating transaction records to trick targets into sending cryptocurrency to the wrong places, and are compromising smart contracts to steal cryptocurrency. And in some cases, they’ve been purchasing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet systems to help power their efforts.

“Agile criminal networks are integrating these new technologies faster than anticipated, driven by new online marketplaces and service providers which have supercharged the illicit service economy,” John Wojcik, a UNODC regional analyst, tells WIRED. “These developments have not only expanded the scope and efficiency of cyber-enabled fraud and cybercrime, but they have also lowered the barriers to entry for criminal networks that previously lacked the technical skills to exploit more sophisticated and profitable methods.”

For years, China-linked criminals have trafficked people into gigantic compounds in Southeast Asia, where they are often forced to run scams, held against their will, and beaten if they refuse instructions. Around 200,000 people, from at least 60 countries, have been trafficked to compounds largely in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos over the last five years. However, as WIRED reporting has shown, these operations are spreading globally—with scamming infrastructure emerging in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa.

Most prominently, these organized crime operations have run pig butchering scams, where they build intimate relationships with victims before introducing an “investment opportunity” and asking for money. Criminal organizations may have conned people out of around $75 billion through pig butchering scams. Aside from pig butchering, according to the UN report, criminals across Southeast Asia are also running job scams, law enforcement impersonation, asset recovery scams, virtual kidnappings, sextortion, loan scams, business email compromise, and other illicit schemes. Criminal networks in the region earned up to $37 billion last year, UN officials estimate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of this revenue is allowing scammers to expand their operations and diversify, incorporating new infrastructure and technology into their systems in the hope of making them more efficient and brutally effective.

For example, scammers are often constrained by their language skills and ability to keep up conversations with potentially hundreds of victims at a time in numerous languages and dialects. However, generative AI developments within the last two years—including the launch of writing tools such as ChatGPT—are making it easier for criminals to break down language barriers and create the content needed for scamming.

The UN’s report says AI can be used for automating phishing attacks that ensnare victims, the creation of fake identities and online profiles, and the crafting of personalized scripts to trick victims while messaging them in different languages. “These developments have not only expanded the scope and efficiency of cyber-enabled fraud and cybercrime, but they have also lowered the barriers to entry for criminal networks that previously lacked the technical skills to exploit sophisticated and profitable methods,” the report says.

Stephanie Baroud, a criminal intelligence analyst in Interpol’s human trafficking unit, says the impact of AI needs to be considered as part of a pig butchering scammer’s tactics going forward. Baroud, who spoke with WIRED in an interview before the publication of the UN report, says the criminal’s recruitment ads that lure people into being trafficked to scamming compounds used to be “very generic” and full of grammatical errors. However, AI is now making them appear more polished and compelling, Baroud says. “It is really making it easier to create a very realistic job offer,” she says. “Unfortunately, this will make it much more difficult to identify which is the real and which is the fake ads.”

Perhaps the biggest AI paradigm shift in such digital attacks comes from deepfakes. Scammers are increasingly using machine-learning systems to allow for real-time face-swapping. This technology, which has also been used by romance scammers in West Africa, allows criminals to change their appearance on calls with their victims, making them realistically appear to be a different person. The technology is allowing “one-click” face swaps and high-resolution video feeds, the UN’s report states. Such services are a game changer for scammers, because they allow attackers to “prove” to victims in photos or real-time video calls that they are who they claim to be.

Using these setups, however, can require stable internet connections, which can be harder to maintain within some regions where pig butchering compounds and other scamming have flourished. There has been a “notable” increase in cops seizing Starlink satellite dishes in recent months in Southeast Asia, the UN says—80 units were seized between April and June this year. In one such operation carried out in June, Thai police confiscated 58 Starlink devices. In another instance, law enforcement seized 10 Starlink devices and 4,998 preregistered SIM cards while criminals were in the process of moving their operations from Myanmar to Laos. Starlink did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

“Obviously using real people has been working for them very well, but using the tech could be cheaper after they have the required computers” and connectivity, says Troy Gochenour, a volunteer with the Global Anti-Scam Organization (GASO), a US-based nonprofit that fights human-trafficking and cybercrime operations in Southeast Asia.

Gochenour’s research involves tracking trends on Chinese-language Telegram channels related to carrying out pig butchering scams. And he says that it is increasingly common to see people applying to be AI models for scam content.

In addition to AI services, attackers have increasingly leaned on other technical solutions as well. One tool that has been increasingly common in digital scamming is so-called “crypto drainers,” a type of malware that has particularly been deployed against victims in Southeast Asia. Drainers can be more or less technically sophisticated, but their common goal is to “drain” funds from a target’s cryptocurrency wallets and redirect the currency to wallets controlled by attackers. Rather than stealing the credentials to access the target wallet directly, drainers are typically designed to look like a legitimate service—either by impersonating an actual platform or creating a plausible brand. Once a victim has been tricked into connecting their wallet to the drainer, they are then manipulated into approving one or a few transactions that grant attackers unintended access to all the funds in the wallet.

Drainers can be used in many contexts and with many fronts. They can be a component of pig butchering investment scams, or promoted to potential victims through compromised social media accounts, phishing campaigns, and malvertizing. Researchers from the firm ScamSniffer, for example, published findings in December about sponsored social media and search engine ads linked to malicious websites that contained a cryptocurrency drainer. The campaign, which ran from March to December 2023 reportedly stole about $59 million from more than 63,000 victims around the world.

Far from the low-tech days of doing everything through social engineering by building a rapport with potential victims and crafting tricky emails and text messages, today’s scammers are taking a hybrid approach to make their operations as efficient and lucrative as possible, UN researchers say. And even if they aren’t developing sophisticated malware themselves in most cases, scammers are increasingly in the market to use these malicious tools, prompting malware authors to adapt or create hacking tools for scams like pig butchering.

Researchers say that scammers have been seen using infostealers and even remote access trojans that essentially create a backdoor in a victim’s system that can be utilized in other types of attacks. And scammers are also expanding their use of malicious smart contracts that appear to programmatically establish a certain agreed-upon transaction or set of transactions, but actually does much more. “Infostealer logs and underground data markets have also been critical to ongoing market expansion, with access to unprecedented amounts of sensitive data serving as a major catalyst,” Wojcik, from the UNODC, says.

The changing tactics are significant as global law enforcement scrambles to deter digital scamming. But they are just one piece of the larger picture, which is increasingly urgent and bleak for forced laborers and victims of these crimes.

“It is now increasingly clear that a potentially irreversible displacement and spillover has taken place in which organized crime are able to pick, choose, and move value and jurisdictions as needed, with the resulting situation rapidly outpacing the capacity of governments to contain it,” UN officials wrote in the report. “Failure to address this ecosystem will have consequences for Southeast Asia and other regions.”

Source

Wired