With primaries for the 2024 US Presidential election just a few months away, a recent report from Microsoft states that Chinese affiliates are trying to spread disinformation about important issues to influence US voters through local social media networks.
In a blog post, the company announced a new report from the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC). The report, in PDF format, appears as part of MTAC’s ongoing series examining current cyber threats from various groups in different parts of the world. This week’s report looks at threats centered in east Asia, including China.
“Since approximately March 2023, some dubious Chinese IO entities on Western social media began leveraging generative artificial intelligence (AI) to generate visual content,” Microsoft said in the report. This relatively high-quality visual content led to higher levels of engagement from actual social media users. “These images bear the hallmarks of diffusion-assisted rendering and are more eye-catching than the strange visual content of previous campaigns.”
Microsoft’s blog post in this report also notes that it expects China to continue to develop and improve these prolific AI-generated social media visuals in the future, but it is currently unknown “how and when it will deploy it at scale.”
Earlier this summer, Microsoft announced that a Chinese-linked hacker group known as Storm-0558 had managed to access the email accounts of the US and European governments. Also recently, the company revealed that due to multiple flaws in its security methods, the group was able to obtain an MSA key to gain access to these accounts. The company says it has taken measures to close these vulnerabilities.
Microsoft issued a warning in August about another threat actor group based in China called Flax Typhoon. The company says that this hacker group has been conducting espionage campaigns targeting Taiwan since 2021.
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