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Yuan said on Friday it had blocked a “small number” of WhatsApp accounts linked to an Iranian hacking group that targeted officials associated with the president. Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.
The company said in a statement Blog Posts The fake WhatsApp accounts appear to come from an Iranian threat actor known as APT42, and other tech companies such as Google Before describe It is an “Iranian government-backed cyber espionage organization” that targets various activists, non-governmental organizations, media organizations, etc.
Mehta said the scheme aimed to exploit “political and diplomatic officials and other public figures, including some with ties to the administrations of President Biden and former President Trump.” The campaign also targeted people in Israel, Palestine, Iran and the United Kingdom
With less than 75 days until the November election, Meta, which has come under increasing public scrutiny for Facebook’s exploitation and manipulation in the last two presidential races, said it had not found any evidence that WhatsApp users’ accounts had been compromised and was sharing more information with “law enforcement and industry peers.”
Meta said its security team discovered APT42’s involvement after analyzing suspicious messages reported by an unspecified number of users as having been received from fraudulent WhatsApp accounts.
“These accounts impersonated technical support from AOL, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft,” Meta said in a blog post. “Some people who were targeted by APT42 reported these suspicious messages to WhatsApp using our in-app reporting tool.”
Trump campaign team explain Earlier this month, a foreign power hacked into its network and illegally accessed internal communications. Microsoft also explain At the time, it identified several Iranian hacking groups attempting to influence the U.S. presidential election, and that a group linked to APT42 “sent a spear-phishing email to a senior official of the presidential campaign in June from a compromised email account of a former senior adviser.”
In 2019, Microsoft explain Security services have uncovered several hackers linked to the Iranian government who are believed to have targeted an unspecified U.S. presidential campaign in addition to attacking other government officials and media outlets.
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