The Ghostwriter Campaign and Trends in Disinformation Today

Information operations (IO) gained prominent public attention in 2016
during the U.S. general election. Since then, new campaigns have
continued to be exposed, and the tactics actors employ have evolved.
In this episode of 'Eye on Security', Lee Foster, our Senior Manager
of Information Operations Intelligence Analysis, joins host Luke
McNamara to talk all about disinformation, a recent influence campaign
that we refer to as Ghostwriter, and what we could see play out in the
2020 general election.

We start with Lee sharing overall trends and changes in IO that his
team has observed since early 2016. We then discuss the increasing
usage of synthetic media (“deepfake”) images that threat actors are
employing in their campaigns, and how fabricated content is leveraged
in coordinated inauthentic activity across forums and social media.

Moving on to Ghostwriter, Lee describes all the tactics, techniques
and procedures related to this recent influence campaign, and goes on
to compare this activity to another well-known IO campaign: Secondary
Infektion.

Finally, no chat about disinformation would be complete without
discussing how it could play out during the 2020 U.S. general
election. Check out the episode today to hear Lee’s predictions for
the upcoming election and what the future holds for information
operations in general.