The US authorities have seized two domain names and searched nearly a thousand social media accounts linked to a sophisticated AI-enhanced social media bot farm operated by Russian threat actors. The bot farm, designed to disseminate disinformation both in the United States and abroad, leveraged advanced artificial intelligence to create fake social media profiles purportedly belonging to individuals in the US.

Court documents revealed that the bot farm used an enhanced software package dubbed “Meliorator” to generate false personas on various social media platforms. This software, incorporating AI components such as image production and text generation, allowed to create and mainten fake accounts on a large scale.

Separately, law enforcement and security agencies from the US, Canada, and the Netherlands have released a joint advisory highlighting Russian state-sponsored operations using covert Meliorator software for influencing audiences in the US, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Ukraine, and Israel.

According to court documents, the bot farm was created and run by a deputy editor-in-chief at RT (Russia Today), a Moscow-based state-backed news organization.

The bot farm utilized private email servers to register fake social media accounts, which were supported by the two seized domain names -mlrtr[.]com and otanmail[.]com obtained from a US-based provider Namecheap. These domains were then used to establish the email servers necessary for creating the fake social media accounts via the bot farm software.

Last week, international intelligence community InformNapalm disclosed details of Razroev Alexander Denisovich, an officer of Russia's Department of Information and Mass Communications (DIMC) responsible for running PSYOPS via Facebook targeting French audiences.