A Russian threat-actor is targeting Ukrainian citizens with email Psychological Operations (PSYOPs) campaigns aimed at making them believe Russia is winning the war, new research from ESET has revealed.
Two different waves of the disinformation campaign were detected by the firm – the first in November 2023 and the second at the end of December.
The PSYOP campaign, dubbed Operation Texonto, is designed to raise doubts about the progress of the conflict among Ukrainians and Ukrainian speakers abroad. The contents of the emails contained warnings of impacts such as heating interruptions, medicine shortages and food shortages in the region.
ESET also highlighted a separate spearphishing campaign designed the steal credentials for Microsoft Office 365 accounts, which it believes are linked to the PSYOPs emails due to similarities in the network infrastructure used.
This spearphishing campaign targeted a Ukrainian defense company in October 2023 and an EU agency in November 2023.
Additionally, the email server used by the attackers to send the PSYOP emails was reused two weeks later to send typical Canadian pharmacy spam messages – a popular campaign within the Russian cybercrime community.
The researchers have linked all these campaigns to a single Russian-aligned group with high confidence, due to the tactics, techniques and procedures used, its targets, the content of the messages.
No tags.
