Technique T0152.003: Website Hosting Platform

Summary: Examples of Website Hosting Platforms include Wix, Webflow, Weebly, and Wordpress.

Website Hosting Platforms help users with managing online infrastructure required to host a website online; such as securing IP Addresses and Domains.
Belongs to tactic stage: TA07

Incident	Descriptions given for this incident
I00107 The Lies Russia Tells Itself	The Moscow firm Social Design Agency (SDA) has been attributed as being behind a Russian disinformation project known as Doppelganger: The SDA’s deception work first surfaced in 2022, likely almost immediately after Doppelganger got off the ground. In April of that year, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, disclosed in a quarterly report that it had removed from its platforms “a network of about 200 accounts operated from Russia.” By August 2022, German investigative journalists revealed that they had discovered forgeries of about 30 news sites, including many of the country’s biggest media outlets—Frankfurter Allgemeine, Der Spiegel, and Bild—but also Britain’s Daily Mail and France’s 20 Minutes. The sites had deceptive URLs such as www-dailymail-co-uk.dailymail.top. As part of the SDA’s work, they created many websites which impersonated existing media outlets. Sites used domain impersonation tactics to increase perceived legitimacy of their impersonations (T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona, T0152.003: Website Hosting Platform, T0149.003: Lookalike Domain).
I00108 How you thought you support the animals and you ended up funding white supremacists	This article examines the white nationalist group Suavelos’ use of Facebook to draw visitors to its website without overtly revealing their racist ideology: Suavelos uses Facebook and other platforms to amplify its message. In order to bypass the platforms’ community standards and keep their public pages active, Facebook pages such as “I support the police” are a good vehicle to spread a specific agenda without claiming to be racist. In looking back at this Facebook page, we followed Facebook’s algorithm for related pages and found suggested Facebook pages [...] This amplification strategy on Facebook is successful, as according to SimilarWeb figures, it attracts around 111,000 visits every month on the Suavelos.eu website. [...] Revenue through online advertisements can be achieved by different platforms through targeted advertisements, like Google Adsense or Doubleclick, or related and similar sponsored content, such as Taboola. Accordingly, Suavelos.eu uses both of these websites to display advertisements and consequently receives funding from such advertisements. Once visitors are on the website supporting its advertisement revenue, Suavelos’ goal is to then turn these visitors into regular members of Suavelos network through donations or fees, or have them continue to support Suavelos. Suevelos created a variety of pages on Facebook which presented as centring on prosocial causes. Facebook’s algorithm helped direct users to these pages (T0092: Build Network, T0151.001: Social Media Platform, T0153.006: Content Recommendation Algorithm, T0151.003: Online Community Page, T0143.208: Social Cause Persona). Suevelos used these pages to generate traffic for their WordPress site (T0122: Direct Users to Alternative Platforms, T0152.003: Website Hosting Platform, T0152.004: Website Asset), which used accounts on a variety of online advertising platforms to host adverts (T0146: Account Asset, T0153.005: Online Advertising Platform).

Incident

Descriptions given for this incident

I00107 The Lies Russia Tells Itself

The Moscow firm Social Design Agency (SDA) has been attributed as being behind a Russian disinformation project known as Doppelganger:

The SDA’s deception work first surfaced in 2022, likely almost immediately after Doppelganger got off the ground. In April of that year, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, disclosed in a quarterly report that it had removed from its platforms “a network of about 200 accounts operated from Russia.” By August 2022, German investigative journalists revealed that they had discovered forgeries of about 30 news sites, including many of the country’s biggest media outlets—Frankfurter Allgemeine, Der Spiegel, and Bild—but also Britain’s Daily Mail and France’s 20 Minutes. The sites had deceptive URLs such as www-dailymail-co-uk.dailymail.top.

As part of the SDA’s work, they created many websites which impersonated existing media outlets. Sites used domain impersonation tactics to increase perceived legitimacy of their impersonations (T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona, T0152.003: Website Hosting Platform, T0149.003: Lookalike Domain).

I00108 How you thought you support the animals and you ended up funding white supremacists

This article examines the white nationalist group Suavelos’ use of Facebook to draw visitors to its website without overtly revealing their racist ideology:

Suavelos uses Facebook and other platforms to amplify its message. In order to bypass the platforms’ community standards and keep their public pages active, Facebook pages such as “I support the police” are a good vehicle to spread a specific agenda without claiming to be racist. In looking back at this Facebook page, we followed Facebook’s algorithm for related pages and found suggested Facebook pages

[...]

This amplification strategy on Facebook is successful, as according to SimilarWeb figures, it attracts around 111,000 visits every month on the Suavelos.eu website.

[...]

Revenue through online advertisements can be achieved by different platforms through targeted advertisements, like Google Adsense or Doubleclick, or related and similar sponsored content, such as Taboola. Accordingly, Suavelos.eu uses both of these websites to display advertisements and consequently receives funding from such advertisements.

Once visitors are on the website supporting its advertisement revenue, Suavelos’ goal is to then turn these visitors into regular members of Suavelos network through donations or fees, or have them continue to support Suavelos.

Suevelos created a variety of pages on Facebook which presented as centring on prosocial causes. Facebook’s algorithm helped direct users to these pages (T0092: Build Network, T0151.001: Social Media Platform, T0153.006: Content Recommendation Algorithm, T0151.003: Online Community Page, T0143.208: Social Cause Persona).

Suevelos used these pages to generate traffic for their WordPress site (T0122: Direct Users to Alternative Platforms, T0152.003: Website Hosting Platform, T0152.004: Website Asset), which used accounts on a variety of online advertising platforms to host adverts (T0146: Account Asset, T0153.005: Online Advertising Platform).

Counters	Response types

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Technique T0152.003: Website Hosting Platform

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