# Technique T0085.004: Develop Document * **Summary**: Produce text in the form of a document. * **Belongs to tactic stage**: TA06 | Incident | Descriptions given for this incident | | -------- | -------------------- | | [I00071 Russia-aligned hacktivists stir up anti-Ukrainian sentiments in Poland](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00071.md) | “On August 16, 2022, pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Joker DPR (Джокер ДНР) published a forged letter allegedly written by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. In the letter, Kuleba supposedly asked relevant Polish authorities to rename Belwederska Street in Warsaw — the location of the Russian embassy building — as Stepan Bandera Street, in honor of the far-right nationalist who led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during WWII.

[...]

The letter is not dated, and Dmytro Kuleba’s signature seems to be copied from a publicly available letter signed by him in 2021.”

In this example the Telegram channel Joker DPR published a forged letter (T0085.004: Develop Document) in which they impersonated the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs (T0097.111: Government Official Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona), using Ministry letterhead (T0097.206: Government Institution Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona). | | [I00102 Ignore The Poway Synagogue Shooter’s Manifesto: Pay Attention To 8chan’s /pol/ Board](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00102.md) | On April 27, 2019, at around 11:30 a.m. local time, a young man with a semi-automatic rifle walked into the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in Poway, California. He opened fire, killing one worshipper and wounding three others. In the hours since the shooting, a manifesto, believed to be written by the shooter, began circulating online. Evidence has also surfaced that, like the Christchurch Mosque shooter, this killer began his rampage with a post on 8chan’s /pol/ board.

Although both of these attacks may seem different, since they targeted worshippers of different faiths, both shooters were united by the same fascist ideology. They were also both radicalized in the same place: 8chan’s /pol/ board.

This has been corroborated by posts on the board itself, where “anons,” as the posters call themselves, recirculated the shooter’s since-deleted post. In it, the alleged shooter claims to have been “lurking” on the site for a year and a half. He includes a link to a livestream of his rampage — which thankfully does not appear to have worked — and he also includes a pastebin link to his manifesto.

The very first response to his announcement was another anon cheering him on and telling him to “get the high score,” AKA, kill a huge number of people.

Before carrying out a mass shooting, the shooter posted a thread to 8chan’s /pol/ board. The post directed users to a variety of different platforms (T0146.006: Open Access Platform, T0151.012: Image Board Platform, T0115: Post Content, T0122: Direct Users to Alternative Platforms); a Facebook account on which the shooter attempted to livestream the shooting (T0146: Account, T0151.001: Social Media Platform); and a manifesto they had written hosted on pastebin (T0146.006: Open Access Platform, T0152.005: Paste Platform, T0115: Post Content) and uploaded to the file sharing platform Mediafire (T0152.010: File Hosting Platform, T0085.004: Develop Document).

The report looks deeper into 8chan’s /pol/ board:

8chan is a large website, which includes a number of different discussion groups about everything from anime to left-wing politics. /pol/ is one particularly active board on the website, and it is best described as a gathering place for extremely online neo-Nazis.

[...]

I’ve browsed /pol/ on an almost daily basis since the Christchurch shooting. It has not been difficult to find calls for violence. On Monday, March 25 of this year, I ran across evidence of anons translating the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto into other languages in an attempt to inspire more shootings across the globe.

This tactic can work, and today’s shooting is proof. The Poway Synagogue shooter directly cited the Christchurch shooter as his inspiration, saying he decided to carry out his attack roughly two weeks after that shooting. On /pol/, many anons refer to the Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, as “Saint Tarrant,” complete with medieval-inspired iconography.

Manifestos posted to 8chan are translated and reshared by other platform users (T0101: Create Localised Content, T0146.006: Open Access Platform, T0151.012: Image Board Platform, T0115: Post Content, T0084.004: Appropriate Content).

When I began looking through /pol/ right after the Poway Synagogue shooting, I came across several claims that the shootings had been a “false flag” aimed at making the message board look bad.

When Bellingcat tweeted out a warning about shitposting and the shooter’s manifesto, in the immediate wake of the attack, probable anons even commented on the Tweet in an attempt to deny that a channer had been behind the attack.

This is a recognizable pattern that occurs in the wake of any crimes committed by members of the board. While the initial response to the Christchurch shooter’s massacre thread was riotous glee, in the days after the shooting many anons began to claim the attack had been a false flag. This actually sparked significant division and debate between the members of /pol/. In the below image, a user mocks other anons for being unable to “believe something in your favor is real.” Another anon responds, “As the evidence comes out, its [sic] quite clear that this was a false flag.”

In his manifesto, the Poway Synagogue shooter even weighed in on this debate, accusing other anons who called the Christchurch and Tree of Life Synagogue shootings “false flags” to merely have been scared: “They can’t fathom that there are brave White men alive who have the willpower and courage it takes to say, ‘Fuck my life—I’m willing to sacrifice everything for the benefit of my race.’”

Platform users deny that their platform has been used by mass shooters to publish their manifestos (T0129.006: Deny Involvement). | | [I00126 Charming Kitten Updates POWERSTAR with an InterPlanetary Twist](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00126.md) | The target of the recently observed [highly targeted spearphishing attack by “Charming Kitten”, a hacker group attributed to Iran] had published an article related to Iran. The publicity appears to have garnered the attention of Charming Kitten, who subsequently created an email address to impersonate a reporter of an Israeli media organization in order to send the target an email. Prior to sending malware to the target, the attacker simply asked if the target would be open to reviewing a document they had written related to US foreign policy. The target agreed to do so, since this was not an unusual request; they are frequently asked by journalists to review opinion pieces relating to their field of work.

In an effort to further gain the target’s confidence, Charming Kitten continued the interaction with another benign email containing a list of questions, to which the target then responded with answers. After multiple days of benign and seemingly legitimate interaction, Charming Kitten finally sent a “draft report”; this was the first time anything opaquely malicious occurred. The “draft report” was, in fact, a password-protected RAR file containing a malicious LNK file. The password for the RAR file was provided in a subsequent email.

In this example, threat actors created an email address on a domain which impersonated an existing Israeli news organisation impersonating a reporter who worked there (T0097.102: Journalist Persona, T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona, T0149.003: Lookalike Domain, T0149.002: Email Domain) in order to convince the target to download a document containing malware (T0085.004: Develop Document, T0147.003: Malware). | | Counters | Response types | | -------- | -------------- | DO NOT EDIT ABOVE THIS LINE - PLEASE ADD NOTES BELOW