iSight warns : A new report details how a group of hackers, believed to be from Iran, used fake social media profiles to gather information from military and political figures in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and other countries.
Security experts at iSight Partners have called it the most sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign ever discovered. But let's take a look at the way the hackers, whose main goal was to gather information, moved.
The hackers' ploy has been going on for the past three years. During the three years, hackers created fake profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ to get closer to their targets.
They even created a fake news website that republished content from services like the BBC and other major news agencies.
The hackers' goals "remain unclear." According to iSight, the hackers could have collected their victims' key activities and locations, updates from social media, usernames and passwords from spear-phishing attacks, and other information from malware designed to extract information from its targets.
The fake news site is registered in Tehran, the capital of Iran. Its content contains malicious iframes that serve malware.
The security firm that discovered the malicious campaign worked with the FBI, and to inform government agencies and its customers, published the report, which you can find here. As for the rest of us, it's a reminder: Don't trust everything you see on social media.
