Meta, the parent company of Facebook, the best known social network in the world, revealed that it took action against two spying operations in South Asia that used its social media platforms to distribute malware to potential targets.
The first set of activities was described by the company as “persistent and with adequate resources” and undertaken by a group of hackers monitored by the nickname of Bitter APT (also called APT-C-08 or T-APT-17) who target people in India, Pakistan, the United States and New Zealand predominantly.
“Bitter used various malicious tactics to target people online with social engineering and infect their devices with malware“, Declared the members of Meta in their report, “[gli hacker di Bitter] hused a mix of link-shortening services, malicious domains, insecure websites, and third-party hosting providers to distribute their malware“.
The attacks involved the threat author creating bogus profiles on the platform, masquerading as handsome young women in an attempt to build trust with users, to trick them into clicking on bogus links that distributed malware.
“This meant that hackers didn’t need to rely on exploits to deliver malware tailored to their targets; and they could use official Apple services to distribute the application, in an attempt to make it look more legitimate, as long as they got people to download Apple Testflight, to induce them to download the software from there later“Experts said.
Although it is unknown exactly what this Trojan application does, it is suspected that social engineering methods have been used to get people to dump it.
Additionally, the Bitter APT hackers used previously undocumented Android malware called Dracarys.
Through the Meta social network (Facebook), Dracarys exploits the accessibility permissions of the operating system to install dubious applications, record audio, acquire photos and collect sensitive data from infected phones, such as call logs, contacts, files, text messages, the location and various information about the device.
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