San Francisco: Facebook has taken tough action against China-based hackers who abused its platform to target activists, journalists and dissidents predominantly among the Uyghur community.
The Facebook threat intelligence analysts disabled the accounts of a group of hackers in China known as “Earth Empusa” or “Evil Eye”, disrupting their ability to use their infrastructure to abuse its platform, distribute malware and hack people’s accounts across the Internet.
The investigation and malware analysis found that Beijing Best United Technology Co., Ltd. (Best Lh) and Dalian 9Rush Technology Co., Ltd. (9Rush), two Chinese companies, are the developers behind some of the Android tooling deployed by this group.
“They targeted activists, journalists and dissidents predominantly among Uyghurs from Xinjiang in China primarily living abroad in Turkey, Kazakhstan, the United States, Syria, Australia, Canada and other countries,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy at Facebook, said in a statement late on Wednesday.
The cyber espionage campaign manifested primarily in sending links to malicious websites rather than direct sharing of the malware itself.
“We saw this activity slow down at various times, likely in response to our and other companies’ actions to disrupt their activity,” Facebook said.
The hacker group set up malicious websites that used look-alike domains for popular Uyghur and Turkish news sites.
