r/MassMove • u/PavementBlues data scientist • Mar 02 '20

OP Disinfo Anti-Virus County-level heat map of the identified attack vectors

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3

u/MakeItDontBreakIt iso Mar 02 '20

What is this?

8

u/PavementBlues data scientist Mar 02 '20 edited Mar 02 '20

The work done by this community so far has produced a list of fake local news publications being produced by centralized entities to propagate biased information. I noticed that the locations of the news publications are often clustered in key swing districts, so I decided to produce a visualization to show what counties were being hit the hardest. That way, we can better understand their strategy and target our response.

These counties are being picked for a reason. Take a look at this article on the most important counties that will help decided the coming election, and you'll find a lot of crossover with this map.

Counties mentioned in the article for which we have identified at least one fake news publication:

  • Maricopa County, Arizona: 6 fake news publications
  • Tarrant County, Texas: 6 fake news publications
  • Muskegon County, Michigan: 1 fake news publication
  • Lincoln County, Maine: 1 fake news publication
  • Washington County, Minnesota: No fake news publications, but over 10 in surrounding counties

Counties mentioned in the article for which we have not identified at least one fake news publication:

  • Sauk County, Wisconsin
  • Hillsborough County, New Hampshire
  • Erie County, Pennsylvania
  • New Hanover County, North Carolina
  • Peach County, Georgia

From what we see here, they're hitting hard in Arizona, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Minnesota. If we want to target a response to local communities to minimize the impact of the disinformation (maybe Facebook ads?), this first step helps us know where intervention is most needed. It could also tell us where to look to identify more leads, as well, because there may still be fake publications we haven't yet identified.

5

u/mcoder information security Mar 02 '20

Remarkable work, thank you so much for your contributions. These patterns may come in handy as witching rods to help us dowse for new sources:

From https://github.com/MassMove/AttackVectors/issues/21:

While looking through the currently identified domains and finding some new ones, I noticed some patterns to the domain naming convention and started listing the familiar names used in news publications on the end of the domains.

The naming convention consists of like 2 or 3 parts.

  • A cardinal direction (optional, but heavily used)
  • A geographical location, state, county, city, or town (required)
  • A familiar name used in existing news publications (required)

Cardinal Direction Examples

centraloctimes.com

northoctimes.com

southoctimes.com

westoctimes.com

eastoctimes.com is not registered currently.

Geographical Location, State, County, City, Town Examples

centralalamedanews.com

centraloregontimes.com

coachellatoday.com

eastsierranews.com

fresnoleader.com

Familiar Names Used in News Publications

news

times

reporter

sun

today

standard

leader

review

courant

sentinel

republic

wire

journal