 So I'm very pleased to be able to introduce the two, like, without a doubt coolest people here at DEF CON. I feel embarrassed to share the stage with them. But this is Ivana Hu and Ben Dubau of the Omelos. Okay. So their title of their presentation will be While the Bots Distracted You, Hacking the Electorate. I'm going to give their introductions, too. So Ivana Hu is CEO and partner of Omelos and the non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Omelos is a cutting-edge technology company that exposes imminent risks among digital data. By utilizing machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analytics, Omelos focuses on physical threats and identifies online campaigns of adversarial state and non-state actors. Ivana is also an expert in counterterrorism and countering violent extremism with field work in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Sweden and Sweden, working on neo-nazi and Islamist violent extremists, which is incredible. Ben Dubau, CTO and President Omelos is the Ben began his career tracking the online propaganda of Jihadist, Shi'i extremists, white supremacists and the militia movement. Before joining Google where he aided YouTube in detecting ISIS content, helped the two develop Project Shield, provided subject matter expertise for the redirect method. In 2017, Ben co-founded Omelos with the mission to stop the weaponization of the internet by providing precise data and analysis on how state actors and foreign terrorist organizations manipulate the web to achieve their geopolitical goals. So oh my god Please welcome them. I'm very excited for this talk. Thank you So again, my name is Ben CTO of Omelos and with me is my co-founder and our CEO Ivana So last year I turned 30 and there is nothing that Ivana loves more than trying to make me feel Super-ancient for that fact and There is no fact that is more effective at making me feel super-ancient than that for teenagers 14 of the top 15 most popular celebrities are YouTubers a category that I honestly can't even consider a celebrity But if you look at the numbers, it's pretty undeniable So the Super Bowl average is about a hundred million views each year over the past decade But when you look at one of the top youtubers ninja who basically just records himself playing video games He's accumulated 1.9 billion views That's an insane number But it's nothing compared to Jake Paul the less said about what's on his channel the better But six billion views. He's accumulated on one single YouTube channel Now that's a mind-blowing number But these two put together are barely more than a third of the way to the number one YouTube star PewDiePie who on his channel has accumulated a staggering 22.6 billion views Now having the ability to reach an audience of this size to get them coming back to hear your message Over and over again It's impossible for that to escape the notice of governments and within the past quarter alone The US government has released over 300 RF keys that make reference to social media influence Sadly liberal democracies are playing catch-up here because channels owned by the Kremlin have accumulated 33.9 billion views on YouTube Now when I say channels owned by the Kremlin, I'm not talking about channels with names like American Joe 1776 or God guns in country I'm talking about channels with names like the official channel of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation How those earlier channels are important they get a lot of attention and rightfully so But bots and covert action are only a tiny piece of the overall information warfare strategy of the Russian Federation Over the next 30 minutes Yvonne and I are going to go over the history of that strategy starting with the beginning of Putin's tenure in 2000 when he released his information security doctrine laying out his plans for media consolidation We'll then go to the period starting with the Georgia war in 2008 and Continuing through the bullet and I a square protest in Moscow a period when Russian military leadership became increasingly Paranoid about losing their control over information flows in Russia We'll then go to a period described by Russian military planners as all-out information war beginning with the Euro made on protests and continuing to the 2016 US presidential elections Finally We'll go over our own analysis of where the current state of Russian information warfare stands And what we're doing to better understand how it operates and how it achieves its goals So let's start from the beginning on September 8th 2000 three months after poon were sworn in he released the information security doctrine and The doctrine calls for the bolstering for bolstering the state mass media Expanding their capabilities and promptly convey reliable information to Russian and foreign citizens And he warns against three things first Distributing of a number of countries towards dominance and infringement of Russia's interests in the world information space and to ousted from external and domestic information markets Second the development by a number of states of of information war concepts and Third it was about insufficient state control over the development of the Russian information market and this doctrine was put to practice soon after So before poon became the president the second Chechen war was started by his successor and after a string of terrorist bombings across Russia poon cited these Attacks as a primary reason for escalating the war and so at this point independent media was about 10 years old and NTV were non-governmental TV was the first to have a national audience And he ran a series of investigative articles that challenged pootons narrative For example, it reported on several false flag operations FSB agents were arrested planting bombs and the fact that explosions were announced two hours before they had actually happened So the Russian secretary press secretary in the hell lesson summoned the general manager of NTV And told him that he had crossed the line He then had the general manager jailed and told him that he could only leave the country if he relinquished all shares in NTV gas prom a state Enterprise bought up all of the shares so in Protest and in fear of their lives Reporters from NTV barricaded themselves in their offices, but to no avail NTV at that point had come under full government control and This began a spree of buying media outlets and creating new ones. So after NTV and 2002 gas gas prom also bought shares in TNT the top entertainment channel as well as Echo Muscovy the top radio station Two years later the leading newspaper which had criticized Putin's handling of a hostage situation They left about 300 school children dead. It too came under full government control a year later And then in 2006 Russia 24 and TV Zvezda, which is the official channel of the Ministry of Defense were launched And while the domestic audience within Russia is one of his target populations Putin's information doctrine also covered the much more expansive in International stage and so this in 2006 the state media agency RIA Novosti and along with funding from the federal agency for press and mass communications Launched Russia today. We're just later rebranded to a simply RT a started with the staff of 500 in addition to 200 reporters with the goal of providing a more complete picture of life in Russia Within three years RT along with arms manufacturers power plants and airports were added on to the official list of organizations of strategic importance to the Russian Federation Now the increased focus on international media coincided with a time of increased paranoia about foreign powers trying to take advantage of Russia an Speech that would become infamous before the 2007 international security conference in Munich Kuhni declared that the stationing of NATO troops on the border on the borders of Poland and the Baltic States represented a direct provocation against the Russian Federation The official military doctrine of the Russian Federation would soon list as the top national security threat The build-up of military potential of NATO and the location of its military infrastructure closer to Russian borders This fear soon became acute when in 2008 then US President George W. Bush Signaled his support for the ascension of the former Soviet state of Georgia to NATO Within a few months Russian troops would pour over the border into into the Georgian Republic Along with the military action Russian media went to work portraying the invasion as a humanitarian Intervention to protect the Osset minority in the north of the country Genocide blared the cry on on the lead story on the English broadcast of RT that day newly sworn-in president Dmitry Medvedev Declared that the actions of the Georgian side cannot be caught anything other than genocide once fiercely independent MTV ran a story where they Mis-translated the words of an Osset girl to make it appear as though she was thanking Russian troops for saving her According to the head of the largest Georgian language media conglomerate Georgia has lost the information war since unfortunately Foreign agencies frequently relied on Russian news sources controlled by the Kremlin Georgia's pro-western president had come to power in 2003 as popular protest removed the pro-russian and former Soviet minister president edward shavard nizay Because NATO won an ally on Georgia's southern border as a result of the protest Russian military planners long suspected foul play by NATO was at hand as a similar wave of revolutions hit the Arab world in 2011 organized on American technology and often with the explicit backing of the American government Russian military planners thought that they saw confirmation of their worst fears According to one of the most senior officials in the administration color revolutions are coups from the outside Based on information technology manipulating the people into protest This wave of revolutions would soon spill beyond the Arab world and reach the Kremlin's front door and at the end of 2011 the largest protest in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union occurred at Boletnaya Square protest leaders met with the US Ambassador and the US Secretary of State explicitly released her support for the protesters Putin declared that the US Secretary of State set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work TV dozed the only national broadcaster to report positively on the protest faced a federal investigation and Within 18 months would lose its license to broadcast Through this sort of censorship along with intimidation and in violence The Russian government was able to snuff out the protest movement But even larger turmoil was brewing next door and in 2013 tens of thousands of Ukrainians descended upon Medan Square in Kiev to protest the corrupt pro-russian administration of Victor Yanukovych Russian media was quick to portray the protesters as thugs Releasing videos seeming to show them doing nothing but beating up officials and causing habit The videos were matched with inflammatory stories with RT running a headline entered the neo-nazis Akuta by Nazis declared Russia won the leading broadcaster in Russia NTV released a documentary entitled ordinary fascism Ukrainian variant and the deputy chief of staff to Putin assembled the heads of Russian media Conglomerates and instructed them to portray the riots and protests as US back Junta of radicals and Nazi collaborators But the media blitz was powerless to turn the tide of events and on February 23rd 2014 Yanukovych resigned and a pro-western pro-eu pro-nato administration took over that very same day tens of thousands of Russian troops in unmarked uniforms Infiltrated eastern Ukraine and the Crimea Within four days Russia would declare that it had formally annexed Crimea That very same day chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation The highest ranking uniformed officer in Russia Released an essay that would form the basis of what today in the West is known as the Garasimov doctrine and in Russia as new generation warfare The central thesis is that the role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals Has grown and in many cases. They have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness It is necessary to perfect activities in the information space including the defense of our own objectives Garasimov painted a stark portrait Protests organized on American technology with the support of American and EU NGOs and civil society organizations and the explicit backing of American and EU government Functionaries had manipulated the information environment So effectively that now Ukraine the nation with the second largest Russian population in the world Was under the role of a pro-nato pro-western administration Six weeks later at the international Moscow security conference Russian military brass Raged against what they saw as the most significant loss in information warfare of their time Defense Minister Sergei Shorygu declared that foreign values are being imposed on peoples under the guise of expanding democracy deploying primarily the means of information warfare Garasimov declared that color revolutions are becoming the main means of achieving NATO's political ambitions and Head of the Russian-led treaty Alliance CTSO Nikolai Bujaze Declared that essentially a full-scale information war has been launched in the global information space and An information war has rules of its own Well-known American sci-fi author Robert Seckley Has said the saddest fact is that in an information war the one who tells the truth Always loses. He is limited by the truth while the liar can proclaim whatever he wishes three months later on the 13th anniversary of September 11 Thousands of phones in Centerville, Louisiana Buzzing unison telling residents to take cover indoors When residents went to Twitter to see what was happening. They were greeted by thousands of posts Claiming that ISIS had launched an attack against the local chemical plant This was the opening salvo in what would become one of the most intense and effective information warfare campaigns of all time While multi-billion dollar advertisers dream of getting a single story ranked among Facebook's top 20 most engaged with in the quarter leading up to the 2016 presidential election Four out of the top five most engaged with political stories on Facebook were fake news Spread with the support of Russian bots Well, these bots can be incredibly effective in achieving tactical and strategic goals They are only a small portion of the much larger overarching strategy that Russia employs in the information environment And so given all this historical context We wanted to actually start to quantify the effects of Russian information operations And so we started to look at this of their surface their sophistication across multiple platforms And we're going to show you some of their analysis here So in the six months leading up to the UK Brexit referendum we looked on YouTube the number of videos And how well they performed and so if you add up BBC BBC news and BBC documentary Together they so only produced one-sixth of the videos that RT produced on the topic of Brexit and That number translates to nine times and nine times as many views for RT videos and 12 times as many likes for RT videos With a 33 percent higher favorability rate rating rating for RT videos than BBC ones And we also decided on YouTube to look at every state media agencies that publish in the Arabic language And this is what we found so that's our whore, which is US government backed has about 220,000 million subscribers France to France 24 has a little bit less than one million RT comes in at 3.15 million which is slightly less than what BBC has at 3.16 and the Qatari run Al Jazeera has 4.06 million which isn't surprising because that Arabic is Al Jazeera's primary language And while the number of subscribers is important, we also looked at how many times these subscribers have actually watched the videos So the 220,000 Subscribers for Al Jazeera has about 190 million views France 24 Has 0.31 billion BBC has a little bit less than one billion views and Al Jazeera has 1.42 billion And yet to the tune of 90 million views RT beats out all of them at 1.43 billion and I'm pretty sure that Arabic is not a language that the Russians speak Where at least a lot of Russians speak? Right and so moving from YouTube To Reddit we looked at the amount of disinformation that was spread by the Russians For the most recent EU parliamentary elections in May of this year So the Russians put out almost about a thousand posts from 111 domains Which generated a little bit less than 50,000 more upvotes than downvotes and about 2800 comments And so and just to show the diversity of their operations We also decided to look at the to look at the domestic Domestic mass broadcasting Landscape in Russia and so this is by audience shares in Russia in 2019 of the top 15 channels 11 belong to the Kremlin Out of the remaining four to Have very close ties To the Kremlin as they are actually owned by the alleged personal banker to Putin Right and so I almost we're we strive to compile every single online media property of the Russian Federation across all social media platforms and news to really try to understand their narratives Sentiment as well as their overarching strategies But it's not just Russia that weaponizes the online formation environment There are many other state and non-state actors that do the same thing and we also want to track what they're doing online And once we have that very comprehensive data set of overt information operations data We we want to combine that with the covert size so looking at botnets and sock puppets Etc. So that we can have a full understanding of what they're trying to do and The step after that is to combine information operation strategies and capabilities with those of cyber security in The Russian military cyber activities fall under the overarching Umbrella information operations command so that their strategies are all aligned and we need to do the same thing it can be tempting to assume that Western values are Universal and that our understanding of media as the fourth estate as the Organizations that keep the government in line is how the press works everywhere in the world But to assume that with Russian media is to ignore what both Russian leadership and the ownership of these media Organizations are telling not only their staff, but the public According to Putin there should be patriotically minded people at the head of state information resources People who uphold the interests of the Russian Federation and keep in mind that accounts for about three quarters of all media in Russia According to the head of RIA Novosti the umbrella group that owns the RT and tasks the Russian Newswire service We are supported by the presidential administration and by the government You know there is freedom of speech in our country, but the period of impartial journalism is over objectivity is a myth or We can listen to Alexey Volin the deputy the deputy minister of communications who told a graduating class of journalists at Moscow State University a Journalist must firmly remember that he has no task to make the world better to bring the light of true teaching or to lead Humanity on the right path To put this as succinctly as possible We'll turn to the son of one of the most prominent Soviet journalists who today is the minister of defense of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu Who has said the media is a branch of the armed forces? What this mindset and its full realization can accomplish? I can't explain any better than the head of the Russian Federation can so I'm going to turn it over to him to close this out Thank you. Do we have time for questions? Okay, cool. I think So we have time for one or two questions Yeah, so the the question is how did we identify what posts in our reddit analysis were actually Russian disinformation so we relied on the EU's database EU versus info where they on every day update disinformation coming from Russia. It's manually recorded by Expert analysts so links to those sites are what we counted as Russian disinformation on reddit Okay. Yeah, please meet us outside if you guys have any further questions. Thank you. Thank you so much