Unknown hackers final month focused leaders of the exiled Uyghur group in a marketing campaign involving Windows adware, researchers revealed Monday.
Citizen Lab, a digital rights analysis group primarily based on the University of Toronto, detailed an espionage marketing campaign in opposition to members of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a corporation that represents the Muslim-minority group, which has for years confronted repression, discrimination, surveillance, and hacking from China’s authorities.
Google alerted some WUC members to the hacking marketing campaign in mid-March, prompting the members to contact journalists and Citizen Lab’s researchers, the report stated.
Citizen Lab investigated and located a focused phishing e-mail despatched to members of WUC, impersonating a trusted contact who despatched a Google Drive hyperlink for a password-protected compressed file containing a malicious model of a Uyghur language textual content editor.
The researchers stated the marketing campaign wasn’t notably subtle and didn’t contain zero-day exploits or mercenary adware, however famous that “the supply of the malware confirmed a excessive stage of social engineering, revealing the attackers’ deep understanding of the goal group.”
