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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Associated Press has found evidence that five military wives who received death threats from the self-styled CyberCaliphate were targeted not by jihadists but by the same Russian hacking group, APT28 aka FancyBear, that intervened in the American election and exposed the emails of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta.

The false flag is a case study in the difficulty of assigning blame in a world where hackers routinely borrow one another's identities to throw investigators off track. The operation also parallels the online disinformation campaign by Russian trolls in the months leading up to the U.S. election in 2016.

Links between CyberCaliphate and the Russian hackers — typically nicknamed Fancy Bear or APT28 — have been documented previously. On both sides of the Atlantic, the consensus is that the two groups are closely related.

But that consensus never filtered through to the women involved, many of whom were convinced they had been targeted by Islamic State sympathizers right up until the AP contacted them.

"Never in a million years did I think that it was the Russians," said Ricketts, an author and advocate for veterans and military families. She called the revelation "mind blowing."

"It feels so hilarious and insidious at the same time."

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