CNN
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The State Department on Thursday announced a reward of up to $10 million for knowledge of foreign attempts to interfere in US elections and sought information on the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm. known for its interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The department singled out the IRA, its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin – who is a key ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin – “and linked Russian entities and associates for their engagement in US election interference”.
The IRA and Prigozhin – nicknamed “Putin’s leader” – are sanctioned in the United States. The troll farm used Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to try to sow discord and intervene in the 2016 presidential election, according to the Justice Department.
The State Department appealed for “information about foreign interference in the US election” in its announcement, which comes just three months before Americans head to the polls for the midterm vote.
The US Army’s Cyber Command was sufficiently concerned about the IRA to carry out a hacking operation aimed at targeting the troll farm during the 2018 midterm elections. Then-President Donald Trump, confirmed the operation in an interview with The Washington Post in 2020.
It’s the latest in a series of public appeals by the State Department, under a program called Rewards for Justice, which offers multimillion-dollar rewards for key information about adversaries. Americans. Other announcements last year covered Russian-speaking ransomware gangs, North Korean hackers and a Russian man accused of building malicious computer code that led to the shutdown of a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia. in 2017.
The State Department program is an attempt to cast a wide net in intelligence gathering on threats against US organizations, complementing the more traditional and covert intelligence gathering of US spy agencies. It is unclear how successful the program has been.
The department said its appeal was part of “the U.S. government’s broader efforts to ensure the security and integrity of our elections and to protect against foreign interference in our elections.”
U.S. officials are bracing for a mix of foreign interference and domestic disinformation campaigns about the voting process as the midterm vote nears.
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