Team Jorge

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. One of the organization's primary tools is a software package called Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. The group was exposed in February 2023 after an award-winning undercover operation by journalists from Israel and France as part of a consortium of investigative journalists coordinated by Forbidden Stories. The organization has been active since at least 2015 and boasts of having manipulated 33 presidential elections worldwide, many of them in Africa, and in 27 cases with successful results. Their activities were revealed following a 2022 sting operation in Tel Aviv, carried out by three undercover journalists, who posed as prospective clients and filmed their interactions with Tal Hanan – the group's leader and former Israeli special forces operative – in which he explained the inner workings of the organization. Tal Hanan used the pseudonym "Jorge" when working with the hacking and disinformation group, which inspired the Team Jorge name.