The U.S. has imposed sanctions against the Iranian state-sponsored Cognitive Design Production Center and the Russian state-backed Center for Geopolitical Expertise, as well as its Director Valery Mikhaylovich Korovin, over their involvement in influence operations aimed at interfering with the U.S. presidential election, reports CyberScoop.
While CDPC launched disinformation campaigns and hack-and-leak operations to fuel socio-political tensions across the U.S. before the polls, CGE leveraged generative artificial intelligence to establish an extensive network of legitimate news outlet-spoofing websites, according to a statement from the Treasury Department. "CGE built a server that hosts the generative AI tools and associated AI-created content, in order to avoid foreign web-hosting services that would block their activity," said the Treasury Department. Other Russian and Iranian disinformation operations have also been identified by federal intelligence agencies and threat intelligence firms. "Today's sanctions build on numerous previous U.S. government actions that have disrupted Iran’s attempts to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions and Russia’s global malign influence campaigns and illicit cyber activities," said State Department Press Secretary Matthew Miller.
