People are outlined as they pose with their mobile devices in front of a screen projected with a Facebook logo, in this illustration of the image taken at Zenica on October 29, 2014. REUTERS / Dado Ruvic / File Photo
Facebook says it has disrupted a long-running Palestinian intelligence-led cyberespionage campaign that includes spies posing as journalists and the deployment of a trapped-breasted app to send human rights stories.
In a report released on Wednesday, Facebook (FB.O) accused what it said was the cyber wing of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PSS), which is loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, of having conducted rudimentary piracy operations to Palestinian journalists, activists, and dissidents, as well as other groups in Syria and other places in the Middle East.
PSS spokesman Ikrimah Thabet dismissed Facebook’s allegations and said: “We respect the media, we work within the law that governs our work and we work according to law and order. We respect freedoms, privacy and the confidentiality of information “.
He said the service has good relations with journalists and the Palestinian Journalists Union.
Mike Dvilyanski, Facebook’s head of cyberespionage investigations, told Reuters before the report was published that the campaign’s methods were dirty, but “we see them persistent.”
The PSS had intensified its activities over the past six months or so, Dvilyanski said. He said Facebook believed the organization had deployed about 300 fake or compromised accounts to target approximately 800 people in general.
None of the targets were identified by their name. Facebook said it had issued individual warnings to affected users through its platform and had removed puzzling accounts.
Attributing malicious activity online is notoriously complicated, but Dvilyanski said the world’s largest social network “had several data points linking this activity cluster to the PSS and our confidence in this attribution is quite high.”
According to the Facebook report, the techniques used by the PSS focused largely on tricking users into downloading spyware, for example, by creating fictitious Facebook accounts with images of attractive young women. Facebook said hackers also pretended to be journalists and in some cases tried to get targets to download spyware that pretended to be secure chat apps or an app to send human rights-related stories to its publication.
Some of his Facebook pages posted memes, for example, criticizing Russian foreign policy in the Middle East, to attract private followers.
Facebook also said it had taken action against another long-running campaign linked to a different piracy group, often called “Arid Viper.” He didn’t say who was behind the group.
Facebook said Arid Viper had operated fake Facebook and Instagram accounts and more than a hundred malicious websites, in addition to expanding into surveillance programs for iOS. Targets included Palestinian government officials and security forces, he said.
Our standards: the principles of trust of Thomson Reuters.