Israeli hacking and disinformation team meddling in prez elections exposed by undercover investigation

An international consortium of journalists has unmasked a team of Israeli contractors who allegedly meddled in more than 30 presidential elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media.

‘Team Jorge’, the codename used by the group, is run by 50-year-old Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who works privately using the pseudonym ‘Jorge’.

The unit is said to offer services to covertly meddle in elections without a trace and has run its service in several countries for more than two decades. The group also works for corporate clients.

The consortium of journalists that investigated Team Jorge includes reporters from 30 outlets including Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País. The project is part of a wider investigation into the disinformation industry and has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit that pursues the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters, quotes The Guardian.

Three reporters from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker posed as prospective clients approaching Team Jorge and secretly filmed the footage between July and December 2022. They pretended to be working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying an election.

The meetings with Hanan and his colleagues took place via video calls and an in-person meeting in Team Jorge’s base, an unmarked office in an industrial park in Modi’in, 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.

Hanan described his team as “graduates of government agencies”, with expertise in finance, social media and campaigns, as well as “psychological warfare”, operating from six offices around the world.

Four of Hanan’s colleagues attended the meetings, including his brother, Zohar Hanan, who was described as the chief executive of the group.

Hanan and his team spoke to the journalists about how they gathered intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They also revealed planting material in legitimate news outlets, which are then amplified by the Aims bot-management software.

The team told the reporters that they charge between €6m and €15m for interference in elections and that they accepted payments in a variety of currencies, including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, or cash.

More than six hours of secretly filmed footage revealed that the team’s strategy involved disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns.

The investigation exposed extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge. According to The Guardian, one of the team’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims.

Besides this, it controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts.

Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion.

He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe, quotes The Guardian.

Hanan allegedly runs some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to promote defence exports.

Although the revelations by Team Jorge might cause embarrassment for Israel, it poses new challenges for big tech platforms regarding breaching of security and an even bigger threat for democracies around the world.