Team Jorge and election manipulation
It's called "Team Jorge", an Israeli company that allegedly offered computer hacking services and paid disinformation dissemination, and that allegedly tried to influence dozens of elections around the world discovered by a journalistic investigation
Democracy is at risk and to undermine it this time there would be a secret team with the code name "Team Jorge".
It is a group of Israeli hackers who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media. And he would have done so on the mandate of political authorities and private individuals, in return for monetary compensation.
This is revealed by a survey coordinated by the French non-profit organization "Forbidden Stories", in which the daily newspapers The Guardian, El Pais and El Mundo , the weekly Der Spiegel and Die Zeit took part, among others.
The investigation reveals details of how disinformation is being weaponized by Team Jorge, led by Tal Hanan, a former Tel Aviv special forces agent, who runs a private service offering to secretly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.
The company aims to influence public opinion through defamatory campaigns, false news and illegally acquired information.
In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team talked about how they could gather information about rivals, including using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news organizations, which is then amplified by Aims bot management software.
The Israeli entrepreneur denied the reconstruction of "Forbidden Stories: "I deny any wrongdoing". But Hanan didn't answer detailed questions about Team Jorge's activities.
All the details.
WHAT EMERGES FROM THE FORBIDDEN STORIES SURVEY
The journalistic investigation exposed Team Jorge, a covert Israeli team of contractors operating out of the central city of Modiin, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, as a global source of successful disinformation campaigns that meddled in elections and trade disputes in dozens of countries around the world.
The unit appears to have been working under the radar in elections for more than two decades.
Team Jorge is led by a former Israeli military man, Tal Hanan. For “Forbidden Stories”, in order to achieve its goals, Team Jorge employs fake news and hacking actions. Those conclusions are based on six hours of secretly recorded conversations in which Hanan and his team explain their services.
UNMASKED BY UNDERCOVER VIDEOS
Hanan and his unit, which uses the code name "Team Jorge", were exposed in undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian .
Three journalists – from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker – approached Team Jorge posing as consultants working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying elections. The covertly filmed meetings, which took place between July and December 2022, thus provide a rare window into the workings of commissioned disinformation.
THE SERVICES PROVIDED
Hanan told undercover reporters that his services were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to covertly manipulate public opinion. The material shows that the company has so far interfered in 33 electoral campaigns and votes, for example in Kenya on the presidential elections, in Indonesia on an electoral commission, in California on unspecified activities.
Of these, 27 would have been "successful". In Europe, the company allegedly intervened in the 2017 Catalan independence referendum, which was not recognized by the Spanish government.
MANIPULATION THROUGH THE AIMS PLATFORM
One of Team Jorge's key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions or Aims, for social media manipulation.
'Aims' is the rental software capable of monitoring 30,000 fake online profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets, and Airbnb accounts. Team Jorge also claims to be able to carry out hacking operations on the Telegram instant messaging service and the Gmail e-mail server.
THE TURNOVER
For these services, the Israeli company charges between 400,000 and 600,000 dollars a month.
WHO IS BEHIND TEAM JORGE
“ Team Jorge ” is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the alias “Jorge”. The company, which employs both former military personnel and former intelligence agents, has clients in the worlds of politics and business.
Hanan refused to comment on the allegations, but added that he denied any wrongdoing, "His brother Zohar Hanan, the group's chief executive, said he has always worked in accordance with the law," the Guardian always reports.
THE IMPLICATIONS
“They have sown chaos in democracies around the world,” writes the Israeli business newspaper The Marker, from the Haaretz group.
“The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for large technology platforms, which have been struggling for years to prevent evil actors from spreading falsehoods or breaching security on their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in election-driven disinformation will also ring alarm bells for democracies around the world .
EMBARRASSMENT FOR ISRAEL AFTER THE NSO GROUP CASE
Finally, “Hanan appears to have run at least some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Defense Ministry to promote defense exports,” the Guardian added.
Team Jorge's revelations could cause embarrassment to Israel, which in recent years has come under increasing diplomatic pressure after the Nso Group case, the Israeli company that invented and distributed the Pegasus spy software to at least a dozen states, center of an international scandal for the profile of the subjects involved and for the interception objectives, from journalists to internal and external political opponents, to political exponents.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/cybersecurity/team-jorge-e-la-manipolazione-delle-elezioni/ on Thu, 16 Feb 2023 14:30:08 +0000.