“Russia and Iran have both undertaken cyber influence operations headed into the 2024 presidential election. In our last report, published on August 8, we detailed how Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations sought to undermine the Republican campaign through targeted hack-and-leak operations, covert social media personas, and imposter US news sites. In the past two months, Microsoft has observed a notable shift in Russian influence operations tactics reflecting the changing US political environment. Specifically, we have observed Russia pivot towards targeting the Harris-Walz campaign, with actors disseminating fabricated videos designed to sow discord and spread disinformation about the new Democratic nominee Vice President Harris.”

“Initially, Russian influence operations struggled to evolve their efforts following President Biden’s departure from the 2024 US presidential race. However, in late August and September, we observed two Russian actors MTAC tracks closely, previously reported as Storm-1516 and Storm-1679, using videos designed to discredit Harris and stoke controversy around her campaign.”

“Specifically: Storm-1516, identified by news reports as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm, produced and disseminated two inauthentic videos, each generating millions of views. One video depicted an attack by alleged Harris supporters on a supposed Trump rally attendee, while another used an on-screen actor to fabricate false claims about Harris’s involvement in a hit-and-run accident. This second video was laundered through a website masquerading as a local San Francisco media outlet which was only created days beforehand, ” says a Microsoft Threat Analysis Center blog post.

Actually legitimately kind of surprising that the “hit and run” video turned out to be a Russian disinfo operation. Even though our first instinct was correct, in retrospect it was so freaking amateurish that it is a tad shocking that Ivan was so terrible at it. Maybe we’ve been overestimating the Russians?