A team of Israeli contractors suspected of interfering in more than 30 elections around the world has been linked with the software used to run bogus social media campaigns in several countries, including India, according to a report released on Wednesday.
“Team Jorge” is led by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative.
The undercover footage and documents were leaked to The Guardian by three reporters who approached ‘Team Jorge’ posing as prospective clients.
The investigation into ‘Team Jorge’ was conducted by a group of journalists from 30 different publications, including Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pas.
According to The Guardian, Tal Hanan now works privately under the alias ‘Jorge’ and appears to have been working undercover in elections around the world for more than two decades.’ and appears to have been working undercover in elections around the world for more than two decades.
The methods and techniques described by ‘Team Jorge’ pose new challenges for big tech platforms, which have long struggled to prevent malicious actors from spreading falsehoods or breaching their platforms’ security. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also raise concerns for democracies around the world, the report said.
The Guardian and its reporting partners scoured the internet for Aims-related bot activity. According to the report, it was behind fake social media campaigns, mostly involving commercial disputes, in about 20 countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, India, and the United Arab Emirates.
In a story titled “The Israeli Hackers Who Tried to Steal Kenya’s Election,” Haaretz.com described Tal Hanan as a ‘terrific salesperson.’
“He knows what impresses clients of the factory he established for worldwide hacking, forgery, and fraud operations. To boast of email or Telegram hacking capabilities is one thing – but to take clients on a real-time tour of hacked Telegram accounts is another league entirely,” the report said.
Forbidden Stories, a French non-profit dedicated to pursuing the work of assassinated, threatened, or jailed journalists, coordinated the project as part of a larger investigation into the disinformation industry.
The investigation is part of Forbidden Stories’ Story killers collaboration, and it was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017.
According to “The Guardian,” Lankesh was putting the finishing touches on an article titled “In the Age of False News,” which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India.
