Summary: A person with a military personnel persona presents themselves as a serving member or veteran of a military organisation operating in an official capacity on behalf of a government.
While presenting as military personnel is not an indication of inauthentic behaviour, an influence operation may have its narratives amplified by people presenting as military personnel. Threat actors can fabricate military personnel (T0143.002: Fabricated Persona, T0097.105: Military Personnel Persona) to pose as experts on military topics, or to discredit geopolitical adversaries by pretending to be one of their military personnel and spreading discontent.
People who have legitimately developed a military persona (T0143.001: Authentic Persona, T0097.105: Military Personnel Persona) can use it for malicious purposes, or be exploited by threat actors. For example, someone could take money for using their position as a member of the military to provide legitimacy to a false narrative or be tricked into doing so without their knowledge.
Tactic: TA16 Establish Legitimacy
Parent Technique: T0097 Present Persona
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| I00118 ‘War Thunder’ players are once again leaking sensitive military technology information on a video game forum | Researchers at Mozilla examined influence operations targeting Kenyan citizens on Twitter in 2021, providing “a grim window into the booming and shadowy industry of Twitter influencers for political hire here in Kenya”, and giving insight into operations’ operationalisation: In our interviews with one of the influencers, they informed us of the agile tactics they use to organize and avoid detection. For example, when it’s time to carry out the campaign the influencers would be added to a Whatsapp group. Here, they received direction about what to post, the hashtags to use, which tweets to engage with and who to target. Synchronizing the tweets was also incredibly important for them. It’s what enables them to achieve their goal of trending on Twitter and gain amplification. [...] They revealed to us that those participating in the exercise are paid roughly between $10 and $15 to participate in three campaigns per day. Each campaign execution involves tweeting about the hashtags of the day until it appears on the trending section of Twitter. Additionally, some individuals have managed to reach retainer level and get paid about $250 per month. Their job is to make sure the campaigns are executed on a day-by-day basis with different hashtags. An M-PESA account (T0148.002: Bank Account Asset, T0148.001: Online Banking Platform) was used to pay campaign participants. Participants were organised in WhatsApp groups (T0129.005: Coordinate on Encrypted/Closed Networks, T0151.007: Chat Broadcast Group, T0151.004: Chat Platform), in which they planned how to get campaign content trending on Twitter (T0121: Manipulate Platform Algorithm, T0151.008: Microblogging Platform). |
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