Pravda Network — APT Profile

Pravda Network - named “Portal Kombat” by France’s VIGINUM - is a pro-Russian information-laundering operation built from hundreds of automated pseudo-news portals. The sites produce no original reporting; they republish Russian news agencies, pro-Kremlin social accounts and local institutional feeds under locality- or country-branded “pravda” domains, using mass automation and SEO to saturate search results. Despite the name, the network has no connection to the established Russian newspaper Pravda / pravda.ru or to Ukraine’s Ukrainska Pravda - DFRLab notes the ecosystem “does not share links with the Russian media outlets with the same name”. VIGINUM counted 193 portals in February 2024 and 224 by April 2024, attributing their creation and administration to TigerWeb, a company based in Russian-occupied Crimea and founded by Yevgeny Shevchenko. DFRLab and CheckFirst later mapped roughly 140 subdomains targeting more than 83 countries and regions, relying heavily on machine translation - including minority languages such as Catalan, Galician, Basque, Welsh and Scottish. Its output has since reached AI training data: DFRLab found about 40,000 English-language Pravda articles in Common Crawl by November 2025, up from 37 a year earlier - the technique researchers call “LLM grooming”. Sekoia and VIGINUM assess it as an operation distinct from the DoppelGänger/RRN campaign, whose affiliated accounts separately amplified Portal Kombat sites.

Also tracked as

Portal Kombat, Pravda network, Pravda ecosystem

Vendor research

Countries linked to this actor

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