Hackers for rent spied on 50K individuals in 100 nations, says Meta Platforms

Meta Platforms Inc mentioned Thursday that its platforms had been utilized by seven surveillance-for-hire corporations based mostly out of China, Israel, India and North Macedonia to spy on or monitor as many as 50,000 individuals in 100 nations. The inner investigation — which began earlier this 12 months — zeroed in on seven completely different entities from these 4 nations, which incorporates BellTrox, a hacker for rent based mostly out of India.
While Meta didn’t present particulars of how many individuals had been focused from which nation, most had been journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, households of opposition members, human rights activists, attorneys, medical doctors, and even clergy, it mentioned.
It mentioned, “BellTroX operated fake accounts to impersonate a politician and pose as journalists and environmental activists in an attempt to social-engineer its targets to solicit information including their email addresses, likely for phishing attacks at a later stage. Its activity on our platform was limited and sporadic between 2013 to 2019, after which it paused.”
Meta added it had disabled accounts associated to those corporations and served them with a stop and desist discover, whereas additionally sharing particulars of the inner findings with safety researchers, different platforms and policymakers.
Nathaniel Gleicher, head of safety coverage at Meta mentioned, “It is a shadow industry of companies that operate around the world and provide, who ever will hire them, tools and techniques, to target surreptitiously, innocent people so that they can spy on, surveil, understand who their friends are, what they might be doing with their time. This industry is broader than anyone can imagine.”

The inner report particulars that these seven corporations focused individuals in certainly one of 3 ways: reconnaissance, engagement, and exploitation. In step one, the targets had been silently profiled by these “cyber mercenaries” by typically utilizing software program to gather information publicly obtainable on the web.

“They typically scrape and store data from public websites such as blogs, social media, knowledge management platforms like Wikipedia and Wikidata, news media, forums and dark web sites,” the report mentioned.
The subsequent step within the surveillance chain is engagement, geared toward establishing contact with both the goal or individuals near them in order to construct belief, which is then exploited within the third part.
“The sophistication in tooling varies significantly across this industry, ranging from off-the-shelf malware easily detected by most anti-virus software to single-click or even zero-click exploit links sent to the targets.”