Dodgy 'Hackers' Target Bellingcat Investigators Who Call BS on Moscow

[DonViejo]

Members of Bellingcat, the fact-checking collective known for exposing Kremlin lies, are being slurred by hijacked Twitter accounts posing to be their own.

JOSEPH COX
11.17.17 7:08 AM ET

“Personal data of veterans Ukrainian ATO,” one of the tweets, before linking to a cache of allegedly hacked data, published Thursday reads.

“Tomorrow more,” the account, apparently belonging to Aric Toler, a researcher at open-source intelligence and journalism community Bellingcat, promised. “It will be a sensation, really,” the tweet added.

Except this account, even though it pictures Toler in his messy short hair and brown glasses, does not really belong to the researcher, or even Bellingcat more generally. Instead, this account and a series of others that tweeted similar material throughout the week appears to be part of campaign to discredit Bellingcat, an organization that has repeatedly irked the Russian government and military with well-sourced reports into the MH17 downing. The campaign, although using only a relatively small accounts and fairly crude in sophistication, shows how disinformation trolls may sometimes not just dump allegedly hacked data to harm the actual hacking victim, but also spin it in such a way to have a knock-on effect on other targets, too.

“We’ve nothing to do with the account and not sure why they’d bring us into what they’re doing, maybe to smear us in the eyes of the Ukrainian public,” Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, told The Daily Beast, referring to another account that was claiming association with the organization.

That second account appears to be the epicenter of this smearing mission. “Welcome to the official Anonymous Poland Twitter! Researcher and hacker at @bellingcat,” the account’s Twitter bio reads.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/polish-hackers-target-investigators-who-call-bs-on-moscow