People pose with mobile devices in front of a screen with a Facebook logo projected on it, in this photo, taken in Zenica on October 29, 2014. REUTERS / Dado Ruvic / File Photo
Facebook says it disrupted a long-running Palestinian intelligence campaign, involving spies posing as journalists and deploying a booby-trap app to submit human rights stories.
In a report published Wednesday, Facebook (FB.O) accused the cyber wing of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PSS), which is loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, of conducting seminal hacking operations targeting Palestinian reporters, activists, and dissidents, as well as other groups. in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
PSS spokesperson Ikrimah Thabet dismissed Facebook’s allegations, saying, “We respect the media, we operate by the law that governs our work, and we operate by the law. We respect the freedoms, privacy and confidentiality of information.”
He said the agency has good relations with journalists and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.
Mike Dvilyanski, Facebook’s chief of cyber espionage research, told Reuters ahead of the report’s release that the campaign methods were crude, but “we consider them persistent.”
The PSS had intensified its activities over the past six months, Dvilyanski said. He said Facebook believed the organization had deployed some 300 fake or compromised accounts to target a total of about 800 people.
None of the targets were named. Facebook said it issued individual warnings to affected users through its platform and removed the fraudulent accounts.
Attributing malicious activity online is notoriously tricky, but Dvilyanski said the world’s largest social network “had multiple data points linking this cluster of activity to the PSS, and our confidence in this attribution is quite high.”
According to the Facebook report, the techniques used by the PSS were heavily aimed at tricking users into downloading ready-to-use spyware, for example creating fake Facebook accounts with photos of attractive young women. Facebook said the hackers also pretended to be journalists and in some cases tried to get targets to download spyware masquerading as secure chat apps or an app to submit human rights stories for publication.
Some of their Facebook pages posted memes, for example criticizing Russian foreign policy in the Middle East, to lure certain followers.
Facebook also said it took action against another long-running campaign linked to another hacking group, often referred to as “Arid Viper.” It did not say who was behind the group.
Facebook said Arid Viper operated fake Facebook and Instagram accounts and more than a hundred malicious websites, as well as expanding to iOS surveillance software. The targets included Palestinian government officials and security forces, he said.
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