French officials are investigating a company called BlackCore, based in Israel, for allegedly running a secret campaign to damage the reputation of candidates from a French far-left political party during recent local elections, according to Reuters.

The campaign used a familiar playbook: fake news websites that looked like real news outlets, and networks of phony social media accounts spreading false or misleading stories. The targets were all candidates running with France Insoumise, a far-left party already dealing with accusations about foreign interference in their politics.

BlackCore is not a new name to investigators. The same company has been suspected in election interference cases in New York City and Scotland as well. This suggests the firm works as a commercial service for hire—they help whoever pays them, regardless of which political side is the target.

How do these campaigns work. Fake news websites can make false stories look legitimate. When paired with networks of fake social media accounts that spread the false stories across platforms, the result is misinformation that reaches real people at very low cost. Investigators uncover these operations by looking for clues in the underlying technology: shared servers, overlapping account patterns, and other digital fingerprints. Intelligence agencies and researchers have become much better at spotting these signs.

France has been repeatedly targeted by similar operations in recent elections. The French domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, has experience investigating this kind of interference. The fact that official authorities are leading the investigation suggests this is now a formal case, not just public suspicion.

It is important to note that at this point, BlackCore is under suspicion but has not been charged or convicted of anything. Investigators work with evidence, but legal proof takes time. Even when the technical evidence is strong, it can take months or years for investigators to build a case solid enough to hold up in court.

What matters here is the broader pattern. One company suspected of running similar campaigns across multiple countries and different election systems in a short span of time. Election interference is not new, but the scale and organization of it has changed. Companies that work in political messaging can now recycle the same methods in different countries with minimal adjustment. The internet infrastructure they use—web hosting, social platforms—is global and works the same way everywhere.

Governments have tried to catch up with rules. The European Union recently required big social media platforms to be more transparent and to check for risks to elections. But these rules do not directly control the political consulting firms that actually commission the campaigns. A company can be registered in one country, run servers in another, and target voters in a third, which makes it very hard for any single country to stop them.

France Insoumise sits on the far left of French politics, which made its candidates a logical target for anyone wanting to damage that political group. Whether investigators can find out who hired BlackCore, and whether that person or group is subject to French law, will determine whether this case goes further.

For security professionals who track these threats, the BlackCore case shows that the companies running these operations are still not fully mapped out or stopped. Taking down individual fake networks does not solve the problem if the organizing company stays in business.