A hacking group originating from Belarus attempted to hack Facebook accounts of Ukrainian soldiers and published videos of hacked accounts calling on the Ukrainian military to surrender, according to a new security report from Meta (the parent company of Facebook).
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The hacking campaign, previously dubbed “Ghostwriter” by security researchers, was carried out by a group known as UNC1151, which has been linked to the Belarusian government in an investigation conducted by Mandiant. A February security update from Meta flagged activity from the Ghostwriter operation, but following that update, the company said the group had attempted to compromise “dozens” more accounts, though it was only successful in a few cases.
Where they were successful, the hackers behind Ghostwriter were able to post videos that appeared to come from compromised accounts, but Meta said it had blocked further sharing of those videos.
The spread of fake messages of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering was a tactic by hackers who breached television networks in Ukraine and planted false reports that Ukrainian soldiers had surrendered. While such claims can be quickly debunked, experts have said their purpose is to erode Ukrainians' trust in the media as a whole.
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Details of the latest Ghostwriter hacks were published in the first installment of Meta’s quarterly Adversarial Threat Report, a new offering from the company that builds on a similar report from December 2021 that detailed threats throughout the year. While Meta has previously published regular reports on coordinated inauthentic behavior on the platform, the scope of the new threat report is broader and includes espionage operations and other emerging threats, such as mass content reporting campaigns.
In addition to the hacks of Ukrainian soldiers’ Facebook accounts, the latest report describes a number of other actions carried out by pro-Russian threat actors, including covert influence campaigns against various Ukrainian targets. In one case cited in the report, Meta claims that a group linked to the Belarusian KGB attempted to organize a protest event against the Polish government in Warsaw – the account was immediately taken offline.
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While such foreign influence operations are some of the most dramatic details of the report, Meta says it has seen a rise in influence campaigns waged domestically by repressive governments against their citizens. In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Facebook’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said attacks on internet freedom have indeed intensified.
Source of information: theverge.com
