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Facebook said on Wednesday that China-based hackers had used the social media platform as part of a campaign to hack and spy on the diasporas of Uyghurs, the minority group the country has been accused of committing. “re-education” camps.
The hackers used Facebook to identify, track and send malicious links to Uyghur activists, dissidents and journalists living in the United States, Australia, Canada and Turkey, among other countries, Facebook said.
Facebook has stopped blaming the Chinese government directly for sponsoring the campaign. “We can see the geographic attribution based on the activity, but we can’t really prove who is behind the operation,” company cybersecurity policy manager Nathaniel Gleicher said during a phone call with journalists.
But Facebook said the hackers were part of the same operation as cybersecurity firm Volexity cited in 2019 as being affiliated with the Chinese government. He published research which revealed that the country’s hackers had taken extreme measures to hack and spy on Uyghurs. They used sophisticated and hitherto unknown tools to upload malicious code to several Uyghur news sites in order to hack and spy on almost every smartphone that visited them.
“Who else would have the resources, the time and the effort to go after these people? If you told me it was Iceland I would be quite surprised, ”Volexity CEO Steven Adair said in a phone call Wednesday.
Some of the research on hackers comes from cybersecurity firm Mandiant, Facebook said.
“We thought it was sponsored by the Chinese government,” John Hultquist, head of threat intelligence at Mandiant, said in a phone call.
He added that hacking and spying on phones has become a staple of China’s tactics against people the country wants to track.
“It won’t stop,” Hultquist said. “If you are a security service, using these cell phones is really optimal. You can not only have access to their digital life, but also read their SMS, you can physically locate them, you can activate their speaker. “
Facebook’s cyberespionage chief Mike Dvilyanski said on the call that if he found and deleted fewer than 500 accounts that were sending malicious links to Uyghurs, it was “a hugely targeted operation.”
“We would see them create characters on Facebook who are designed to look like journalists who focus on issues critical to the Uyghur community, who are designed to look like activists who might advocate for the Uyghur community, designed to look like members of the Uyghur community. community, ”said Dvilyanski. “Then use that to entice them to click on those links to expose their devices.”
Several investigative reports have shown that China maintains re-education camps that detain around 1 million Uyghurs, an ethnic group largely based in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. With ubiquitous cameras, facial recognition technology, and intense collection of resident data, it’s one of the most heavily guarded areas in the world.
Beijing has repeatedly denied any mistreatment of its Uyghur minority and called allegations of its hacking efforts “baseless.”
Dozens of countries jointly condemned China’s treatment of Uyghurs and the White House sanctioned two Chinese officials against them on Monday.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nury Turkel, a longtime Uyghur rights activist and member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, said in a phone call that knowing your phone may be taken over by state sponsored hackers is heartbreaking.
“Imagine the government was monitoring your communication, invading your privacy, and you wanted to call your parents to talk to them,” he said. “You can’t say anything other than ‘How are you, have you been taking your pills, how’s your blood sugar? Nothing else.”
“This is one of the ways that China finds a way to create anxiety, a feeling of hopelessness, a feeling of hopelessness, a feeling of insecurity,” Turkel said.
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