Meta Detects Hacking group From Pakistan that targeted Indian Army Personnel

New Delhi (India), May 4, 2023: According to Meta, it took action on at least one network of over a hundred fraudulent Facebook and Instagram accounts related to state-affiliated individuals in Pakistan and targeting military personnel in India.

According to Meta’s adversarial threat assessment, released on Wednesday, this was one of three cyber-espionage operations spotted on its platform in South Asia.

The corporation also took action against the Patchwork hacking gang, which was based in India and targeted people in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Tibet region, and China, including military officials, activists, and minority organisations.

In the report Meta described the hacking group and said, “We took action against about 120 accounts on Facebook and Instagram linked to a hacking group in Pakistan that predominantly targeted people in India and Pakistan, including military personnel in India and among the Pakistan Air Force. Our investigation connected it to state-linked actors in Pakistan.”

According to Meta, while the activity of this group was not extensively sophisticated, it was persistent and targeted several services throughout the internet.

They relied largely on a network of attacker-controlled websites to spread malware via highly targeted campaigns designed to deceive people into clicking on malicious links and installing Android or Windows malware.

Aside from a variety of tactics, such as the use of custom applications and infrastructure, the group linked to state actors in Pakistan also used fictitious personas, posing as recruiters for both legitimate and fictitious defence companies and governments, military personnel, journalists, and women looking for a romantic connection, in an attempt to gain trust from the people they targeted.

On the other hand Patchwork, an Indian hacker network with roughly 50 accounts, also relied on a variety of intricate fictional personas and encouraged targeted people on clicking malicious links and websites.

Meta also discovered six coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB) networks based in the United States, Venezuela, Iran, China, Georgia, Burkina Faso, and Togo, which targeted Meta users worldwide.

To gain legitimacy, these CIB networks constructed bogus accounts on numerous social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Medium, TikTok, and others.

In the published report Meta said, “More than half of them (CIBs) targeted audiences outside of their countries. We removed the majority of these operations before they were able to build authentic audience”.