On Thursday, Facebook disclosed {that a} community of hackers with ties to Iran tried to make use of its platform to focus on US army personnel. At the middle of the marketing campaign was a bunch generally known as Tortiseshell. Facebook says the collective went after people and corporations within the protection and aerospace industries. Its major targets had been within the US, however in addition they sought out individuals within the UK and elements of Europe.
“This activity had the hallmarks of a well-resourced and persistent operation, while relying on relatively strong operational security measures to hide who’s behind it,” Facebook stated. “Our platform was one of the elements of the much broader cross-platform cyber-espionage operation, and its activity on Facebook manifested primarily in social engineering and driving people off-platform (e.g., email, messaging and collaboration services and websites), rather than directly sharing of the malware itself.”
What went down seems to be unprecedented for Tortoiseshell. In the previous, the group has primarily focused IT companies throughout the Middle East. The strategies it employed had been comparable to those who China’s Evil Eye used to focus on the Uyghur group earlier within the yr.
Facebook says the group created “sophisticated online personas” to contact its targets and construct belief with them earlier than making an attempt to persuade them to click on on malicious hyperlinks. They had accounts throughout a number of social media platforms to make their ruse seem extra credible. The group constructed faux recruiting web sites and even went as far as to spoof a reliable US Department of Labor job search instrument. Facebook believes at the very least among the malware the group deployed was developed by Mahak Rayan Afraz, an organization with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iran has been accused of a wide range of malicious on-line actions over the previous yr. Most notably, Microsoft stated final September it was one of many international locations that attempted to meddle within the 2020 US presidential election.
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