Security News > 2023 > May > Meta Uncovers Massive Social Media Cyber Espionage Operations Across South Asia

Three different threat actors leveraged hundreds of elaborate fictitious personas on Facebook and Instagram to target individuals located in South Asia as part of disparate attacks.

"Each of these APTs relied heavily on social engineering to trick people into clicking on malicious links, downloading malware or sharing personal information across the internet," Guy Rosen, chief information security officer at Meta, said.

Also disrupted by meta are six adversarial networks from the U.S., Venezuela, Iran, China, Georgia, Burkina Faso, and Togo that engaged in what it called "Coordinated inauthentic behavior" on Facebook and other social media platforms like Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Medium, TikTok, Blogspot, Reddit, and WordPress.

All these geographically dispersed networks are said to have set up fraudulent news media brands, hacktivist groups, and NGOs to build credibility, with three of them linked to a U.S.-based marketing firm named Predictvia, a political marketing consultancy in Togo known as the Groupe Panafricain pour le Commerce et l'Investissement, and Georgia's Strategic Communications Department.

The network from Iran, per the social media giant, primarily singled out Israel, Bahrain, and France, corroborating an earlier assessment from Microsoft about Iran's involvement in the hacking of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2023.

"The people behind this network used fake accounts to post, like and share their own content to make it appear more popular than it was, as well as to manage Pages and Groups posing as hacktivist teams," Meta said.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2023/05/meta-uncovers-massive-social-media.html