The Wall Street Journal reports: " Russian intelligence agencies have mounted a campaign to undermine confidence in Pfizer Inc.’s and other Western vaccines, using online publications that in recent months have questioned the vaccines’ development and safety, U.S. officials said.
An official with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, identified four publications that he said have served as fronts for Russian intelligence.
The websites played up the vaccines’ risk of side effects, questioned their efficacy, and said the U.S. had rushed the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, among other false or misleading claims.
Though the outlets’ readership is small, U.S. officials say they inject false narratives that can be amplified by other Russian and international media." “We can say these outlets are directly linked to Russian intelligence services,” the Global Engagement Center official said of the sites behind the disinformation campaign." Full article:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-campaign-aims-to-undermine-confidence-in-pfizer-other-covid-19-vaccines-u-s-officials-say-11615129200?
Disinformation is a potent weapon in the current cold cyberwar arsenal. DisInfo attacks are skyrocketing and the number of countries using organized social media manipulation is going up steeply. Rapidly maturing bot technology and the ease of access to social media and other online platforms enable fast, cheap creation of disinfo campaigns.
We need to inoculate our employees against this type of social engineering. KnowBe4 created a special training module that trains your users to Spot And Stop the Spread of Disinformation. This new module covers the red flags that show an email or social media message might be propaganda and trains the end user to apply critical thinking before they forward damaging disinformation.
We strongly suggest we step your users through this module as soon as possible. You can preview this 15-minute module at the KnowBe4 Modstore right now. See below.
The ModStore Preview includes:
