I’ve been scratching my head about the Viginum report on Blackcore. As a quick introduction, the report says an orchestrated online disinformation campaign didn’t work, since the fake accounts didn’t persuade anyone. And so you would think that’s a relief. But instead, I have a nagging feeling that what is actually being sold isn’t the persuasion.
The Blackcore demo page offered a persuasion method and 1,600 avatars to do it with. But the product is more about something that can take a beating, compromise by public exposure, and keep on running campaigns anyway. Delete the shells, keep the registered toolmaker, edit the avatars, reload and fire again. The Viginum report in that context proves the product works as designed, by showing a full pressure takedown isn’t able to take it down.
The report names who’s at the top. The 8200-to-INCD-to-Cygun chain leads to Yigal Unna, a real law firm, a real address, a registry number. So they could name him. And in Section 4 they do the thing that looks like the start of a prosecution. They write atteinte aux intérêts fondamentaux de la Nation, harm to the fundamental interests of the Nation. That phrase is one of the four boxes that VIGINUM’s founding decree requires it to check before it can call anything foreign interference. Section 4 checks the box, VIGINUM detects and names, and yet it cannot prosecute.
Ok. Ready. And then? Nothing happens. Why?
The operation is built to handle it. The foundation layer is fake accounts and disposable websites. Those are illegal and they’re hidden, and after the press coverage in May they evaporated. Flip a switch, they’re gone. The top layer is the opposite: the report says there are legal companies, registered in Sweden and the UK, with named directors. They’re clean on paper, which means finding them nets nothing. They make software. Making software isn’t a “harm“.
The trap is the foundation is easily erased while the parts floating above aren’t breaking any laws. VIGINUM climbs all the way to the top of the system and finds a registered businessman who can say he just sells the usual marketing tools.
Fun history fact: modern marketing was born in WWI government propaganda offices. Creel’s Committee on Public Information under Woodrow Wilson was a civilian agency, the first large-scale propaganda bureau the United States ever ran. The famous Bernays worked inside it. Lippmann spent the war in Army military intelligence, working on Allied propaganda aimed at German troops at the front. The concepts of manufacturing consent back at home were assembled as state service at war between 1917 and 1919, and then privatized into Madison Avenue the moment the war ended.
The reason an investigation goes all the way up to a former head of Israel’s national cyber agency is that this isn’t some random shop. It’s the normal Israeli cyber-export path working as intended: people leave military intelligence, the money and legal cover follow them into private companies, the state encourages it.
Israeli intelligence operators become marketing tool vendors, or “security” monitoring tool vendors.
When investigators reach the root, they can’t claim a company broke the rules. So the technical report builds a case and then looks like it flames out with a generic firm. It can’t cross into demanding a trial for a foreign government’s economic strategy. The report lands on “the Service will continue its investigations” because there is no solution yet for what is really being sold.
And the irony, therefore, is that the French report ends up a sales brochure: Israeli disinformation sold as a resilience product.