Pak hackers targeted Afghan Facebook users amid govt collapse

Hackers from Pakistan used Facebook to target people in Afghanistan with connections to the previous government during the Taliban's takeover of the country, the company's threat investigators. According to news agency Reuters the group, known in the security industry as SideCopy, shared links to websites hosting malware that could surveil people's devices. Targets included people connected to the government, military, and law enforcement in Kabul, it said. Facebook said it removed SideCopy from its platform in August.  The group created fictitious personas of young women as “romantic lures” to build trust and trick targets into clicking phishing links or downloading malicious chat apps. It also compromised legitimate websites to manipulate people into giving up their Facebook credentials.

"It's always difficult for us to speculate as to the end goal of the threat actor," Facebook's head of cyber espionage investigations, Mike Dvilyanski, said. "We don't know exactly who was compromised or what the end result of that was." Facebook said it had not previously disclosed the hacking campaign, which it said ramped up between April and August, due to safety concerns about its employees in the country and the need for more work to investigate the network. It said it shared information with the US state department at the time it took down the operation.  Facebook had last month disabled the accounts of two hacking groups which it linked to Syria's Air Force Intelligence. Facebook's head of global threat disruption, David Agranovich, said the Syria and Afghanistan cases showed cyberespionage groups leveraging periods of uncertainty during conflicts when people might be more susceptible to manipulation.