Ukraine dismantles social media bot farm spreading "panic"
The Ukrainian Security Service said on Tuesday that it shut down a bot farm that was spreading panic on social media and had also been used to send out bomb threats.
Authorities said the bot farm was used to manage more than 18,000 bot accounts and that "organizers from Russia supervised the administrators of the bot farms."
Officials detained three suspects from the Lviv region.
"Two of them used their flats as premises for bot farms, the third participant was responsible for technical maintenance," officials said.
Equipment seized from their premises included two GSM gateways with 92 and two sets of GSM gateways (92 and 375 online channels), 3,000 SIM cards, and laptops and accounting records.
An SSU spokesperson did not want to comment and expand on the bot form's operation beyond the press release.
Catalin Cimpanu
is a cybersecurity reporter who previously worked at ZDNet and Bleeping Computer, where he became a well-known name in the industry for his constant scoops on new vulnerabilities, cyberattacks, and law enforcement actions against hackers.