Mockumentary about Tom Cruise is part of Russian influence campaign targeting Paris Olympics, report says

CNN
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Pro-Russian propagandists are stepping up efforts to denigrate the Paris Summer Olympics next month and undermine Western support for Ukraine with a series of brazen online and offline stunts, private and private experts tell CNN Western officials.

These stunts included using artificial intelligence to impersonate the voice of actor Tom Cruise narrating a mockumentary attacking the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and placing coffins with an inscription invoking the war in Ukraine near of the Eiffel Tower, sources said.

The activity appears to be part of an increasingly frenzied effort by Russian agents to tarnish the Olympics and block any momentum Ukraine is building to use Western-made weapons to attack Russian territory, people told CNN experts who track Russian disinformation. The IOC imposed restrictions on the participation of Russian athletes in the Paris Olympics due to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

There’s a mix of desperation and opportunism in the recent wave of propaganda, said Gavin Wilde, a former Russia expert at the National Security Council. “For the tech-savvy propagandists working in Russia, the alternative they are protecting themselves against is not unimportant: It is a one-way ticket to the front lines,” Wilde told CNN.

Russian agents used Cruise’s fake voice, the Netflix logo and even a fake New York Times review to try to lend legitimacy to the documentary, according to Microsoft analysts, who released a report on the activity on Sunday. The propaganda video, released on social media platform Telegram last year, was “the first glimpse of what would prove to be a vast campaign” by the same Russian propaganda actor to defame the Paris Olympics , Microsoft said.

Russian propagandists also launched fake news claiming that Parisians were buying property insurance due to fears of terrorism around the Olympics, as well as fake press releases claiming to come from the CIA and French intelligence warning of terrorism. terrorism, according to Microsoft.

CNN has requested comment from the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC.

Not all of the recent subterfuges have been posted online.

On Saturday, French police discovered five coffins draped with the French flag, with the words “French soldiers in Ukraine”, near the Eiffel Tower. A French military official told CNN he suspected Russia was involved in the stunt. French police are questioning three men in connection with the incident.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to rule out the possibility of sending French troops to Ukraine has infuriated the Russian government.

In recent days, pro-Russian social media accounts have also shared a doctored video of US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller commenting on Ukraine’s potential use of US-made weapons in Russia. The video appears to have been compiled from two different press appearances by Miller, showing him wearing different ties.

It is not known who made the video. U.S. officials and private experts have not publicly identified the source of the video.

“While this video is demonstrably false, it is a step toward what counterdisinformation researchers are warning about: the use of AI-manipulated media to bolster disinformation operations abroad” , the State Department said in a statement to CNN.

The Russian embassy in South Africa shared a version of the video on its X accounts, according to screenshots captured by a BBC journalist.

Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor at UC Berkley, said the video had the characteristics of AI manipulation.

Farid ran the video through several deepfake detection systems and said these indicated that the voices in the video were created using AI and that the spokesperson’s lip movements of the State Department in the video had been edited using AI lip-syncing software.

“Even if not everyone believes the fake, the constant bombardment of deepfakes leads to a general skepticism of everything we see online,” Farid said.

But Lee Foster, another information operations expert, expressed skepticism that the footage in the video was made using AI.

“From an analytical point of view, it doesn’t make sense to use AI to manipulate mouth movements such that they are basically identical to the original,” Foster told CNN. “AI manipulation of video audio, however, remains an unresolved question.”

Russian antagonism toward the IOC has lasted for years. The IOC has banned Russian athletes from officially competing under the Russian flag in Paris due to the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russian athletes have faced similar restrictions in previous Olympics due to Russia’s alleged doping program.

Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency was behind a destructive cyberattack on computers used during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Paris Olympic officials are bracing for a similar threat next month.

“The GRU reserved some of its most serious cyberattacks for France and the Olympics, and it carried them out when the geopolitical situation was considerably less tense,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst at cybersecurity firm Mandiant , owned by Google.

The Paris Olympics “will be an incredibly attractive target for these actors,” Hultquist added. “Any attack they concoct will aim to undermine the prestige of France and the solidarity at the heart of the event.”