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CyberLegion Claims Hack of $1 Million Russian Bot Farm, Seizes 300 Pro-Kremlin Accounts
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A group identifying itself as CyberLegion has claimed responsibility for hacking into a Russian-controlled bot farm, allegedly worth $1 million, and revealed that 300 social-media accounts and pages have been brought under its control. This was reported by the group itself on October 29.
According to the group’s statement, these accounts previously disseminated pro-Kremlin narratives targeting multiple countries.
In its announcement, CyberLegion stated: “Our first operation—300 accounts and pages that were zombifying and deceiving people in different countries. Now all of them are under the absolute control of CyberLegion—more than half-a-million subscribers are seeing the truth on those pages for the first time.”
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The group also said that within the they will shortly publish it will publish a full list of the workers of the institution coordinating the bot farm, said to be located in the Moscow region.
The disclosure follows broader patterns of state-linked information operations. For example, the US Department of Justice in July 2024 reported disrupting a Russia-government-backed, AI-enabled bot farm which operated fictitious social-media profiles to spread disinformation.
CyberLegion provided technical details of the operation, stating that:
All identified accounts were registered with SIM cards that had been mass-purchased in Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Africa and Europe;
Proxy-servers, fake profiles and the anti-detection browser “Octo Browser” were used for centralized profile management;
Through these accounts the distributors systematically spread narratives beneficial to the Kremlin, including messages aimed at discrediting Ukraine and sowing distrust in foreign states.
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The group emphasized that bot-farms of this nature are maintained at industrial scale, “by our money”, and used to destabilize societies abroad.
CyberLegion invited journalists, investigators and international organisations to collaborate, offering access to materials for verification.
This development comes amid ongoing efforts by Ukrainian authorities to dismantle similar bot-farm operations.
In December 2022, Ukraine’s cyber police dismantled more than a dozen pro-Kremlin bot farms, seizing over 100,000 SIM cards and more than 1.5 million fake accounts.
A spokesperson for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) commented on the broader phenomenon, noting: “Creating highly tailored propaganda is now fast and easy. Russia proved that AI can create realistic-seeming personas, drive content at scale, and trick platforms into believing personas are not bots at all.”
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Earlier, it was reported that the US Department of Justice dismantled a large-scale Russian AI-enabled bot-farm network operated by the FSB and state-media outlet RT, which created fake US-citizen social-media profiles to spread pro-Kremlin narratives.
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