France says it uncovered mass Russian-linked misinformation campaign

France said on Tuesday a Russia-linked misinformation campaign had faked its foreign ministry website, targeted other government websites and usurped several French media as part of broader efforts to smear Ukraine and its Western allies.

Western nations have repeatedly accused Russian operatives of using social media and the internet to spread false or misleading information to undermine them, promote Russia or attempt to sway public opinion in their countries against backing Ukraine in its fight against Russia's invasion.

France has in particular called out Russian activities in Africa, saying that Moscow-linked actors have tried to discredit Paris in West Africa, saturating regular media and social media.

That has prompted France to launch multi-faceted action to reverse an anti-French narrative that has damaged its influence and interests, including with a unit partly dedicated to spotting and dealing with malicious content.

"This campaign is notably based on creating fake internet pages to hack into the identity of national media and government websites, as well as by creating fake accounts on social media networks," Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said in a statement - in what was the first time Paris has publicly called out Russian-linked activities on French soil.

A domain name close to the foreign ministry's name, a practice known as typosquatting, was used and detected on May 29. While the majority of the content was the same, one article was posted suggesting the French government was preparing to impose a tax to raise funds for military aid to Ukraine against Russia's invasion, French officials said.

French media websites usurped

Given the times-consuming procedures to remove such domain names, the website remained online for 15 days before it was taken down, the officials said.

They said the misinformation campaign, known as RNN, has been running for more than a year. It originally stemmed from War on Fakes, a multilingual factchecking platform used by Russia to change the narrative in Ukraine, the officials said.

The campaign managed to also usurp four mainstream French media websites, including leading national newspapers Le Figaro and Le Monde, publishing 49 fake articles linked to Ukraine's war and its impact, according to the officials.

Media in other countries had also been targeted.

The campaign had four objectives, they said: creation of websites producing content denigrating Ukrainian officials; usurping the identity of national media and European government websites by typosquatting their domain names; creation of francophone websites with disputed content related to French news; creation of bogus accounts, primarily on Facebook and Twitter, to spread content from the websites created by RNN.

Moscow has consistently denied carrying out hacking operations.

France's foreign ministry said it could not directly attribute the attacks to Russian authorities, but Colonna said Russian embassies and Russian cultural institutes were involved in the campaign by spreading information from the RNN network.

Earlier this week, Swiss authorities said several government websites had been targeted in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that was claimed by pro-Russian hackers.

In May, US authorities said the FBI had sabotaged a suite of malicious software used by elite Russian spies.