Summary:
Russian state-sponsored media organization RT, formerly known as Russia Today, has used AI-powered software called Meliorator to create realistic social media personas for spreading disinformation over the past two years. Meliorator, an AI-enabled bot farm generation and management tool, has targeted several countries, including the US, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Ukraine, and Israel, according to a joint advisory by government agencies from the US, Canada, and the Netherlands on July 9.

Meliorator's campaign began in 2022 and, while initially identified on X, it aims to expand to other platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The tool has been used to spread disinformation on topics such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including videos where President Putin justified Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Security Officer Comments:
Meliorator’s features include creating authentic-appearing social media personas, deploying typical social media content, mirroring other bot personas' disinformation, and perpetuating pre-existing false narratives to amplify foreign influence. It includes an administrator panel called 'Brigadir' and a back-end tool named 'Taras,' and was developed using Redmine, an open-source project management application. Users typically connect via virtual network computing (VNC) connections.

According to a US Department of Justice (DoJ) press release, the bot farm was developed by an individual who served as deputy editor-in-chief at RT. Meliorator creates false identities, known as 'souls,' and automated actions called 'thoughts.'

Suggested Corrections:
To counter bot farms, intelligence agencies recommend that social media platforms implement processes to validate human-operated accounts, upgrade authentication and verification processes, identify suspicious user agent strings, and enhance account security settings. Following joint action by intelligence agencies, the US DoJ seized two related domain names and 968 social media accounts used in disinformation operations.

Link(s):
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/russia-rt-ai-software/