Hired guns of disinformation proliferate online, report finds

Calling themselves digital marketing companies, companies offering disinformation campaigns as a service online have played a role in trying to influence elections from Canada’s British Columbia province to suppressing dissent in the United Arab Emirates, according to the report by Talos. — Dreamstime/TNS

WASHINGTON: A variety of online tools and companies offering disinformation campaigns as a service are flourishing online, making it easier for state-sponsored and other hackers to mount such campaigns with little effort, the technology firm Cisco said in a report released Aug 26.

Calling themselves digital marketing companies, the purveyors of disinformation have played a role in trying to influence elections from Canada’s British Columbia province to suppressing dissent in the United Arab Emirates, according to the report – “The Building Blocks of Disinformation”, produced by Cisco’s security research arm called Talos.