An investigation exposes “Team Jorge”, an Israeli hacking and social media disinformation unit for hire claiming covert involvement in 33 presidential elections
- Group sells hacking services and access to vast army of fake social media profiles — Evidence unit behind disinformation campaigns across world
The story also extends two other threads: a [[a:867425|Colombian hacker who claimed years ago to rig Latin American elections through social media manipulation and campaign espionage]], and [[a:972799|hacker-for-hire group RocketHack's infiltration of some 3,500 politicians' and journalists' accounts]]. What was once episodic scandal coverage is consolidating into evidence of a standing commercial market for election interference.
First-order effects
Political clients who hired Team Jorge face exposure: the unit claims covert involvement in 33 presidential elections, so campaigns and governments implicated must answer for hacking services and armies of fake social media profiles bought on their behalf.
Platforms hosting those fake-profile networks face immediate cleanup pressure — Team Jorge's inventory of avatars is exactly the coordinated inauthentic behavior social media companies claim to police.
Second-order effects
Rival firms in the same gray market — the Psy-Group and RocketHack mold — face the classic post-exposé squeeze: client attrition, scrutiny from researchers like Toronto's Citizen Lab, which built its reputation exposing government hacking tool vendors such as NSO.
Election authorities and security vendors get a concrete adversary profile, shifting procurement toward detection of account networks and intrusion tooling rather than generic cybersecurity.
Third-order effects
If each exposé merely kills one brand while demand persists, the structural outcome is a whack-a-mole market: private intelligence shops rebranding faster than investigators can name them, pushing regulators toward governing the buyers — campaigns and governments — rather than chasing vendors.
Sustained documentation of mercenary election interference erodes trust in electoral outcomes themselves, giving legitimate actors an incentive to pre-emptively attribute anomalies to for-hire units.
The trend: Election interference is hardening into a durable for-hire service industry that survives individual firm shutdowns by rebranding, keeping investigative outlets and academic labs like Citizen Lab in a permanent cat-and-mouse role.
A team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media has been exposed in a new investigation. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
SCOOP: We went undercover & discovered a secret disinformation-for-hire group called Team Jorge selling election interference, hack-and-leak & influence as a service. They claim to have meddled in 33 elections THREAD #TeamJorge @FredMetzo @GurMegiddo https://www.haaretz.com/...
There's an entire new tech sector that's targeting authenticating real humans & flagging bots, at times leveraging crypto to do so, but the apparatus is bigger than most people realize & has been embedded in most of our interactions online o combat it with existing tools
WHOA: Team of Israeli ex-spies boast of manipulating 33 elections w/ #hacking & #bots. Tricked into demoing #telegram hacking & bot army to undercover investigators. By @skirchy @manisha_bot @davidtpegg @carolecadwalla & @burke_jason https://www.theguardian.com/ ... https://twitt…
Critically important article on the same hacking elections team. Thank goodness for news journalists who are doing what govt intelligence agencies devoted to democratic values should have discovered!!! Tell me that tech companies don't need oversight! https://www.theguardian.com/…
Read! It's easy to dunk on bot farms & spyware but it's important to understand social networks created an attack vector that's been weaponized to attack democracies & big tech has stood passively by with only press statements to dissuade systematic change https://www.haaretz.com…
Today we're unmasking ‘Team Jorge’, a hacking and disinformation unit who covertly meddle in elections. They told undercover reporters they've interfered in more than 30 presidential campaigns.🧵 https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
NEW: Undercover reporters expose a group of disinformation experts calling themselves “Team Jorge” and the tactics they claim to have used to influence political campaigns worldwide — including hacking emails and planting fake news. #StoryKillers https://www.occrp.org/...
No morals, no qualms, no borders: From a small office building , a group of Israelis is spreading global disruption, boasting of election intereference, hacking and manipulation investigation by @GurMegiddo @omerbenj @FredMetzo Haaretz/RadioFrance 1/n https://www.haaretz.com/...
How a team of Israeli & French reporters uncovered a team of Israeli contractors that claims to have manipulated 30 elections in countries around the world https://www.occrp.org/...
Twisted information, an army of avatars, hacking of high-ranking officials: the second part of #StoryKillers pulls back the curtain on “Team Jorge”, a shadowy “black ops” entity that worked with Cambridge Analytica. https://forbiddenstories.org/ ... https://twitter.com/...
The impact of Israel's surveillance and security sector, private and public, on democratic systems around the world is astonishing. The damage inflicted by these efficient and careful machines of disruption is yet to be acknowledged. https://twitter.com/...
Team Jorge's bot-management software appears to have grown significantly by 2022... Hanan told the undercover reporters... it controlled a multinational army of more than 30,000 avatars, complete with digital backstories that stretch back years. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
You might be wondering: Who are they? #StoryKillers reveals the identity of Jorge, whose real name is Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces officer who surrounds himself with former Israeli intelligence officers and spin doctors. He denied “any wrong doing”. https://twitter.…
Wild. *Haaretz* also has a story about Israeli spies attacking democracy through technology. Man, it's all really coming out. https://www.haaretz.com/...
“Hanan told undercover reporters his services, which others describe as black ops, were available to intel agencies, political campaigns & companies seeking to secretly manipulate public opinion.They'd been used in Africa, South&Central America, US&Europe” https://www.theguardian…
One service they sell: a software controlling an army of 30,000 avatars with accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
I have reason to believe that a certain incoherent, incontinent candidate has used these people in the past & is probably using them now, & alongside his considerable war chest & his militia, they are the reason for his inexplicable confidence. A THREAD. https://www.theguardian.c…
This investigation was conducted with a 100 journalists around the world, initiated by Forbidden Stories, who pursue the work of killed or threatened journalists. For this series, our inspiration was Gauri Lankesh, murdered for exposing disinformation. https://www.theguardian.com…
This @haaretzcom story adds more. It turns out that this group swindled Israeli Intel out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for useless or faked ‘info’ https://www.haaretz.com/...
The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Wow, Mossad's shadowy tactics are truly formidable. The most cunning intelligence operation in the world. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
2/ “After you've created credibility, what do you do? Then you can manipulate” Good to see @meta take action on these accounts. Honestly though we are at the absolute tip of the iceberg. https://twitter.com/...
Fascinating and vividly reported investigation, but what's not clear to me at this point is what was the impact of all of this attempted meddling? Did it influence the outcome of any elections? I am sure there's more to come https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Propaganda is not only just spread by States, there is a growing, secretive Industry of liars and hackers for hire. Today we expose one actor in this field on front pages globally: Team Jorge, who meddles in elections, infiltrates private accounts and orchestrates bot campaigns. …
Great report on the disinformation-for-pay industry — election meddling makes headlines, but there's plenty of work done for industry in our region too. And some often more clumsy work done by lobbyists/pr dabbling... https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
This is the most important story today. And when you see people saying AI won't change anything much, remember that in the year 2000 the Daily Mail said the internet was a fad that would die out in a few months https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
NEW: Meet ‘Team Jorge’, a hacking and disinformation unit who claim to have covertly meddled in over 30 elections around the world. My first investigation with the Guardian team. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
But which politicians are in power because of this firm? That the article doesn't say leaves me wondering how effective all this stuff is. https://twitter.com/...
When I was in Kenya, my driver told me a lot about the impact of the 2007 election violence on his family - that these firms make cash out of trying to fuel tensions that could lead to a repeat of that kind of violence, it's grotesque https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
I hope that the @Europarl_CAT will include these revelations to clarify the foreign interference in political processes in Europe, and specifically the disinformation about the Catalan independence movement. @guardian https://www.theguardian.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
This is HUGE. Months after the revelation that a team of Israeli ex-spies have been working in #Greece for companies affiliated to #Predator, an Israeli contractor whose job is to meddle in elections, admits to having a team set in Greece - only months before gen. election. 1/2 h…
“This is our experience... to hurt the logistics of the opponents, to intimidate them, to create an atmosphere that nobody will go to the elections,” How Secret Cyber Mercenaries Disrupt Elections - OCCRP https://www.occrp.org/...
The Guardian seem to have interviewed some random grifter who showed them a PR demo, and just assumed everything he said was true. Bizarrely thin story to lead with. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...