CopyCop Deepens Its Playbook with New Websites and Targets www.recordedfuture.com/research/…

Since March 2025, Insikt Group has observed CopyCop (also known as Storm-1516), a Russian covert influence network, creating at least 200 new fictional media websites targeting the United States (US), France, and Canada, in addition to websites impersonating media brands and political parties and movements in France, Canada, and Armenia. CopyCop has also established a regionalized network of websites posing as a fictional fact-checking organization publishing content in Turkish, Ukrainian, and Swahili, languages never featured by the network before. Including the 94 websites targeting Germany reported by Insikt Group in February 2025, this amounts to over 300 websites established by CopyCop’s operators in the year to date, marking a significant expansion from our initial reporting on the network in 2024, and with many yet to be publicly documented.

These websites are very likely operated by John Mark Dougan with support from the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE) and the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). CopyCop uses these websites as infrastructure to disseminate influence content targeting pro-Western leadership and publish artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content with pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian themes in support of Russia’s offensive operations in the global information environment.