Team Jorge is the name given to an outfit of Israeli contractors specialized in the use of malign cyber activities including hacking, sabotage, and bot farm-run social media disinformation campaigns to manipulate the outcomes of elections.
[6] Team Jorge's activities were revealed after a sting operation by three undercover journalists, Gur Megiddo of TheMarker, Frédéric Métézeau of Radio France and Omer Benjakob of Haaretz,[8] posing as prospective clients filmed interactions with Tal Hanan in Tel Aviv in 2022 in which he explained the inner workings of the organization.
[6] To test Team Jorge's abilities, the journalists tasked it with a disinformation campaign called #RIP_Emmanuel, spreading a death hoax about social media personality Emmanuel the emu.
[5] He also claimed that Team Jorge interfered in the 2014 Catalan independence referendum, hacked the emails of the chief-of-staff of Trinidad and Tobago and leaked a document to cause a political crisis, passed false information to an ABC journalist to influence the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election against former president Hugo Chávez, ran a 2022 campaign claiming the Polisario Front has ties to Hezbollah and Iran, and another 2022 campaign defaming Ali bin Fetais Al-Marri, the UN envoy for combating corruption.
[9] The wider investigation involved journalists from a total 30 outlets, coordinated by Forbidden Stories,[6] and included The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Le Monde, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), El País, and other media organizations in France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Spain, Tanzania, and the United States.
[14] During the undercover meeting with journalists in 2022, Hanan showcased his ability to hack into the Telegram account of Dennis Itumbi, a digital strategist for William Ruto during the 2022 Kenyan general election.
[15] Métézeau of Radio France and Le Monde found that Team Jorge created various segments that Rachid M'Barki [fr], a French television presenter for BFM TV, had broadcast without editor approval, possibly on behalf of foreign governments.