Thank you for the opportunity to address this important issue and discuss our work.
Within our mandate at Mandiant Intelligence, we identify, monitor and tackle threats, including coordinated influence operations and cyber-espionage campaigns. Our teams disrupt activity on a regular basis and publish our findings. We also provide expert analysis on threats originating from countries like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and criminal organizations.
Russia has a vast covert apparatus that includes their intelligence services, as well as contractors from their private sector. These organizations have differing capabilities, which range from complex intrusion operations to coordinated inauthentic behaviour on social media platforms. Though these threats are serious, we have been successful in disrupting this type of activity on our platforms quickly and effectively.
Russian information operations activity has been used in a number of contexts to support Russia's strategic and tactical concerns, but it is most consistently focused on undermining democratic society by highlighting polarizing political and social issues. Since the launch of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this activity has prioritized narratives designed to erode western support for Ukraine.
Our team is constantly on the lookout, because this activity is always adapting. The actors develop new techniques to blend in with real users or scale their operations or, in the case of intrusion actors, new techniques that might help them gain illicit access to systems. We continue to monitor and adapt to the use of new techniques to proactively tackle new threats.