“It was a campaign against lies that started with a lie,” FLIP stated in its report.įLIP also published a Ministry of Defense internal communique detailing the plan, alongside the $240,000 contract with the company hired to concoct the scheme. Since its launch, Colombia’s state “cyber patrol” unit has been singling out unflattering stories that it claims are fake and surveilling the online activity of its critics under the guise of fact checking, an activity usually carried out by independent, verified organizations. On October 29, Colombian media watchdog, the Foundation for the Independence and Liberty of the Press (FLIP), released new details on the campaign. Screenshot from twitter logs May 6th, in which government accounts all changed their social media profiles to the same image reading “block attempt” The website blackouts would turn out to be a hoax, a highly-coordinated PR stunt designed by the government to draw attention to a fact-checking campaign, a fact they quietly admitted to in a blog post the following day, but not before they had flooded social media with a video that failed to mention it had all been staged. The protests were sparked by a proposed tax reform, but quickly grew to encompass widespread police brutality and the failure to implement the peace accord that, at least officially, ended Colombia’s civil war in 2017. The blackout hit as the country was reeling from nationwide protests that left 73 dead, mostly at the hands of the police, so a hack of the Ministry of Defense and high-ranking police accounts would represent a serious escalation and a shocking security breach. Dozens of high-ranking defense and police officials' social media profile pictures suddenly changed to the same image- the text “block attempt” over a black background.Īs the State kept complete radio silence, pro-government onlookers began to spread rumors of a “cyberterrorism” attack. Image from an internal report by Colombia’s Ministry of Defense in which they outline their plan to simulate being hacked as part of a PR campaignīogotá, Colombia- On the morning of May 6, the websites of Colombia’s Ministry of Defense and National Police went black.
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