WASHINGTON — Facebook says it has disrupted a long-running
cyberespionage campaign run by Palestinian intelligence which features spies
posing as journalists and the deployment of a booby-trapped app for submitting
human rights stories.
اضافة اعلان
In a report published Wednesday, Facebook accused what it
said was the cyber wing of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PSS),
which is loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, of running rudimentary hacking
operations that targeted Palestinian reporters, activists, and dissidents, as
well as other groups in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
PSS spokesman Ikrimah Thabet rejected Facebook's accusations
and said: "We respect the media, we work within the law that governs our
work, and we work according to law and order. We respect freedoms, privacy, and
confidentiality of information."
He said the service has good relationships with journalists
and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.
Mike Dvilyanski, Facebook's head of cyber espionage
investigations, told Reuters ahead of the report's publication that the
campaign's methods were crude, but "we do see them as persistent."
The PSS had intensified its activities over the past six
months or so, Dvilyanski said. He said Facebook believed that the organization
had deployed some 300 fake or compromised accounts to target roughly 800 people
overall.
None of the targets were identified by name. Facebook said
it had issued individual warnings to the users concerned via its platform and
removed the rogue accounts.
Attributing malicious activity online is notoriously tricky,
but Dvilyanski said the world's largest social network "had multiple data
points that linked this cluster of activity to the PSS and our confidence in
this attribution is quite high."
According to the Facebook report, the techniques used by the
PSS focused heavily on tricking users into downloading off-the-shelf spy
software, for example by creating dummy Facebook accounts with pictures of
attractive young women. Facebook said the hackers also posed as journalists
and, in some cases, tried to get targets to download spyware masquerading as
secure chat apps or an app to submit human rights-related stories for
publication.
Some of their Facebook pages posted memes, for example
criticizing Russian foreign policy in the Middle East, to lure particular
followers.
Facebook also said it had taken action against another
long-running campaign linked to a different hacking group, often dubbed
"Arid Viper." It did not say who was behind the group.
Facebook said Arid Viper had operated fake Facebook and
Instagram accounts and more than a hundred malicious websites, as well as
expanding into iOS surveillanceware. The targets included Palestinian
government officials and security forces, it said.
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