On July 25th, 2019, several social media profiles propagated fake news claiming that two famous Israeli women, Yona Elian And Roni Dalumi (an actor and a singer, respectively), have died. These accounts posted the story on Israeli media outlets pages, as well as a number of Israeli social media groups, primarily on Facebook.
Read the full report: Yemen-Based Disinformation Campaign
Note that each of these posts shared a links to fake media outlets’ websites. Investigating these websites ClearSky uncovered a large-scale disinformation campaign based in Yemen, operating since 2016. The operation is comprised of several dozen fake media outlets, impersonating legitimate Arab media outlets from the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.
Despite many grammatical and spelling errors and the gruesome content, the fake information went viral quickly and uncontrollably. Despite the promptly issued official denials of the news, it took a long time to refute them.
These sites bear many similarities to the global disinformation operation conducted by Iran for 7 years, which we exposed on November 2018. Further, the operators of the Yemen-based campaign are using the exact same methodology as the Iranian operation. Accordingly, ClearSky’s assessment is that there may be a connection between these operators.
One possible connection is that the operators of this operation are related to the Houthi movement which has strong connections to the Iranian regime. While this attribution is still under investigation, it is clear that at the very least the Yemen operators were inspired from the Iranian operation.
Indicators of compromise are available for subscribers of the ClearSky threat intelligence service in MISP event 1689.