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A collaboration of some 30 news outlets led an undercover operation to reveal an Israeli group allegedly engaged in Foreign Information Manipulation and Intervention (FIMI) against multiple countries and regions. The investigation named a former Israeli special forces operative as the group’s mastermind.
Tel Hanan, a 50-year-old former special forces operative, was named the head of a group dubbed ‘Team Jorge’ by the investigative report. The report came from a consortium of 30 international news outlets, including the French Forbidden Stories and Israeli Haaretz, and The Marker.
According to The Times of Israel news editor Michael Bachner, stated that “Three journalists from Haaretz, The Marker, and Radio France, held a series of video call meetings with Hanan over six months last year, posing as consultants for elements that wanted to delay an election in a large, politically unstable country in Africa.”
Bachner added that the reporters uncovered through the series of meetings that Team Jorge successfully meddled with 27 out of 33 presidential-level elections globally. The reporters also discovered that the team was responsible for fake campaigns on commercial disputes in 20 countries, including the US, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and Switzerland.
The investigation also revealed the strategies employed by Team Jorge on how they weaponise disinformation. The Guardian correspondents reported, “One of Team Jorge’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions (AIMS). It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram, and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets, and Airbnb accounts.”
The undercover reporters noted that Hanan boasted that his team could quickly gather intelligence on the target and had the capability of planting false material in legitimate news outlets. The team then utilises AIMS to amplify the misinformation.
Many cybersecurity experts claim that this discovery of the capability of the Israeli black ops group is posing severe challenges for big tech platforms. The report shows that cyber attackers have significantly evolved and have been flying under the radar as they breach security systems to plant misinformation and offer the service to shady individuals.
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