Security News > 2022 > May > Fronton: Russian IoT Botnet Designed to Run Social Media Disinformation Campaigns

"This system includes a web-based dashboard known as SANA that enables a user to formulate and deploy trending social media events en masse. The system creates these events that it refers to as Инфоповоды, 'newsbreaks,' utilizing the botnet as a geographically distributed transport."

The existence of Fronton, an IoT botnet, became public knowledge following revelations from BBC Russia and ZDNet in March 2020 after a Russian hacker group known as Digital Revolution published documents that it claimed were obtained after breaking into a subcontractor to the FSB, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Further investigation has traced the analytical system to a Moscow-based company known as Zeroday Technologies, with links identified to a Russian hacker by the name of Pavel Sitnikov, who was arrested in March 2021 on charges of distributing malicious software via his Telegram channel.

Fronton functions as the backend infrastructure of the social media disinformation platform, offering an army of compromised IoT devices for staging DDoS attacks and information campaigns by communicating with a front-end server infrastructure over VPNs or the Tor anonymity network.

SANA, on the other hand, is designed to create fake social media persona accounts and manufacture newsbreaks, which refer to events that create information "Noise" with the goal of shaping online discourse by means of a response model that allows the bots to react to the news in a "Positive, negative, or neutral fashion."

"Meanwhile, pro-PRC and pro-Iran campaigns have leveraged the Russian invasion opportunistically to further progress long-held strategic objectives."

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/05/fronton-russian-iot-botnet-designed-to.html