"The Service for Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference [VIGINUM] has identified a digital information manipulation campaign targeted against several European states since September 2022, including France," the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security said in a press release Tuesday.
"This manipulation campaign, tracked by VIGINUM for a year, has the objective of discrediting western support for Ukraine," the service said.
VIGINUM was created in 2021 to assess and counter disinformation from foreign sources.
The agency said the influence campaign has been "Named RRN ... due to the central role played by the "media outlet" Reliable Recent News."
According to VIGINUM, the operation has diffused pro-Russian propaganda, used a technique called "typosquatting" to mimic website domain names, and created false accounts to promote pro-Kremlin narratives.
Typosquatting is a relatively unsophisticated method, which relies on common mistakes people make entering web addresses to take them to a site mimicking the site they actually were trying to access.
VIGINUM said fake webpages had been set up to impersonate major French new publications such as Le Monde, Le Parisien and Le Figaro, as well as pages that were set up to mimic French government websites.
The disinformation campaign has focused on four themes -- the alleged ineffectiveness of sanctions against Russia, the notion of "Russophobia" in western states, alleged "barbarity" and Neo-Nazism from Ukrainian forces, and alleged negative effects of hosting Ukrainian refugees.
"From the end of the month of May 2023, the RRN campaign saw unprecedented development because it was the identity of the website of the European Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was usurped," VIGINUM said.
The Kremlin's main propaganda outlet directed at foreign audiences, RT (Formerly Russia Today), has been shut down in France, as well as multiple European nations. RT's American outlet voluntarily shut down operations in March 2022.
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