Meta denounces the companies behind the espionage of 50,000 people

Meta is the new name of Mark Zuckerberg’s group including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp. Last Thursday, Meta announced that it had closed no less than 1,500 Facebook and Instagram accounts because they were closely linked to a case of “cyber-mercenaries”. These accounts have been used to spy on up to 50,000 activists, dissidents and journalists around the world.

These accounts turned out to be connected to seven companies offering services ranging from online public information collection, identity theft, and digital espionage and account hacking.

Meta immediately took action

Meta claims to have warned these 50,000 people as quickly as possible. While conducting its own investigation, Meta discovered that the perpetrators of these malicious acts were targeting journalists and dissidents. They also made gratuitous claims about authoritarian regimes, the families of opposition members and human rights activists.

Meta revealed that four companies were closely related to the case and are located in Israel. These companies are Cobwebs Technoloqies, Cognyte, Black Cube and Bluehawk CI. The other three are BellTroX, based in India, Cytrox, based in North Macedonia and another based in China but that one has not yet been identified. The latter would have targeted anyone on behalf of the highest bidder.

How do these cyber-mercenaries operate?

In most cases, they show themselves as internet intelligence services, that is to say as specialists in collecting and analyzing information retrieved from websites, blogs, discussion forums and newsgroups. media pages. In order to collect personal information, these cyber-mercenaries create fake accounts on social networks, even going so far as to integrate the groups or conversations on which their targets are located.

In other words, they try to get closer to them by first putting them in confidence and then trapping them by transferring links or attachments to them in order to fraudulently access their phones or computers. This is how they get all the information they need.

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