A hacker on Tuesday managed to briefly commandeer a National Press Club-hosted zoom broadcast featuring Ukrainian officials and others about Russian disinformation -- broadcasting explicit pornographic videos. The Institute for Democracy and Development (PolitA) and the Coalition Against Disinformation organized the event, featuring Ukrainian officials, religious leaders, cybersecurity experts, and political experts discussing the ongoing and escalating Russian disinformation targeting the West and other parts of the world. An extremely graphic pornographic video with the words “CCP ON TOP” was shown on the main presentation screen for a couple of minutes before event organizers regained control. Russia is pouring millions of dollars into a broad disinformation campaign meant to destabilize western governments, stoking partisan fires using fake images and stories attractive to political extremists and conspiracy theorists, the panels said. While this effort has been active for decades, it has gained significant momentum and sophistication in the past several years. Kateryna Odarchenko, president of PolitA and a political consultant, said Russia’s disinformation attempts are at an all-time high as the US elections draw near and the two-year Ukraine war rages on. “I have a background in election organizing and direct consulting, and we worked in Ukraine, we worked in Georgia, we worked in Bulgaria and with the European Parliament a lot,” she said. “From a practical point of view, we saw that Russian intervention in elections and disinformation is horrible … and it’s very effective.”
My eyes are still burning after a troll hacked into a National Press Club-hosted zoom conference on Russian Disinformation... Be careful out there! #russia #cybersecurity #zoombombing #troll #ITleadership https://lnkd.in/eQfCbjh7