The head of a company that partnered with Facebook to monitor disinformation efforts said Wednesday that the 32 accounts removed from Facebook and Instagram were "very similar" to those used by Russia from 2014 to last year.
"What we can tell is that the content, the tactics, the language, was very similar to that that we saw coming from the infamous St. Petersburg, Russia, troll farm from 2014 through 2017," Graham Brookie, who heads the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told Kate Bolduan on CNN.
"I would say the behavior correlates very highly with what we've seen previously."
The St. Petersburg "troll farm," known as the Internet Research Agency, placed thousands of ads on Facebook in 2016 and paid about $80,000 to remotely organize black-rights protests and self-defense classes in U.S. cities to try to sow fear ahead of the 2016 presidential election, according to news reports.
On Tuesday, Facebook said it had uncovered "sophisticated" efforts via the 32 accounts, possibly linked to the Kremlin, to influence U.S. politics on its platforms.
The Facebook and Instagram accounts were involved in "coordinated" political behavior and appeared to be fake, the company said.
But Facebook stopped short of saying the effort was aimed at influencing the November midterm elections, though the timing of the suspicious activity would be consistent with such an effort.
Brookie, a former Obama administration cybersecurity official, told Bolduan that Facebook officials "can say right now with a high degree of confidence" that the ads removed Tuesday had "a very high correlation" to the Russian troll ads.
"But can we say right now today that it was 100 percent Russia?' he posed. "That's going to be a lot more difficult."
Brookie said that the tactics by the trolls were getting "harder to detect" and that the November elections remained "a top threat target" for hackers.
"The tactics are changing," he told Bolduan. "It is getting more sophisticated, harder to detect — and what we saw on the pages [Tuesday] was a very specific focus on highly-polarized issues, as well as growing as much of an audience — then trying to translate to action on the street or in protests."
For 2018, "the mid-term elections are a top threat target," Brookie said. "It is a target for cyber-enabled activity.
He noted reports last week that the Kremlin unsuccessfully tried to hack into the accounts of embattled Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, along with Facebook's Tuesday disclosure, which Brookie called "an influence campaign."
"You do have the clear tell-tale signs that both of those activities are occurring in the lead-up to the 2018 mid-terms," he told Bolduan. "It is a top priority in terms of threats that we face right now."
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