By Dave McKay | July 10, 2020
Usual Suspects, Usual Dirty Tricks
- The World Health Organization was subjected to a phishing attack in March by unknown attackers who tried to access its digital systems.
- In April, Iran-linked hackers launched phishing attacks against Gilead Sciences, which has been working to develop treatments for Covid-19.
- In the US, many states have rushed to address rampant unemployment fraud—coming from overseas.
- The Chinese government increased the country’s invasive digital surveillance and hacking against the Uighur ethnic minority.
- Australia think China is behind a months-long cyber assault against the country’s public and private sectors. China responded by decrying these claims as “baseless and nonsense.”
- In May, security researchers found 845 gigabytes of user data from nine dating apps publicly accessible on the internet. The researchers found that all the apps seem to share a developer. Some list Cheng Du New Tech Zone as their developer in the Google Play Store.
- After a long period of dormancy the hacktivist collective Anonymous resurfaced with a 269-gigabyte data dump of US law enforcement documents. These were published by the activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets on the Juneteenth holiday.
- In the first days of 2020 researchers reported that Iranian hacking groups had been peppering the US power and utilities grid with cyberattacks.
- In June, Google reported he Iran-linked actor APT 35, aka Charming Kitten, had launched phishing attacks against President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
Source: Wired