Both the IRA and Prigozhin — nicknamed “Putin’s chef” — are subject to US sanctions. The troll farm used Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to try to sow discord and interfere in the 2016 presidential election, according to the Justice Department. The State Department appealed for “information on foreign interference in US elections” in its announcement, which comes just three months before Americans head to the polls for midterm voting. The US Army’s Cyber Command was concerned enough about the IRA to conduct a hacking operation to target the troll farm during the 2018 midterm elections. Then-President Donald Trump confirmed the operation in a 2020 interview with the Washington Post. It is the latest in a series of public appeals by the State Department under a program called Rewards for Justice, which offers multimillion-dollar rewards for key information on America’s adversaries. Other announcements in the past year have covered Russian-speaking ransomware gangs, North Korean hackers and a Russian accused of building malicious computer code that caused a petrochemical plant to shut down in Saudi Arabia in 2017. The State Department’s program is an effort to cast a wide net in gathering intelligence about threats to US organizations, complementing more traditional and covert intelligence gathering by US intelligence agencies. It is unclear how successful the program was. The department said its appeal is part of the US government’s “broader efforts to ensure the security and integrity of our elections and to protect against foreign interference in our elections.” US officials are bracing for a mix of foreign meddling and domestic disinformation campaigns about the voting process as midterm voting approaches.
