Google and Meta suspect China of spreading fakes and not only that.
Meta, in its quarterly report on current cyber threats, reported that it has blocked 4,789 fake Facebook accounts*in recent months. These accounts violated the company's anti-disinformation policy.
As Meta found out, the operators of fake accounts used other people's names and photos, posing as Americans and distributing the same content on different platforms.
Their posts often consisted of texts copied from random accounts on X (formerly Twitter) and the media. They also shared real people's posts on Facebook, probably to gain the trust of other users.
Although some of the content was political, there were also posts on other topics - about games, history, models, and animals.
There is no direct evidence that the suspicious accounts were linked to China. However, in mid-2023, the Meta team noticed that some of them changed their nicknames and avatars from American to Indian.
After the change of location, scammers began to spread misinformation about the Dalai Lama, liking and commenting on the corresponding posts.
Meta found similar content in 13 other Facebook accounts and 7 groups, which were also blocked as part of an anti-propaganda campaign.
According to Meta, the attackers were still based in China and primarily conducted activities against India and Tibet, as well as partially against the United States.
At the same time, Google announced more frequent cyber attacks from China on Taiwanese organizations. The company's senior engineer, Kate Morgan, spoke about a "huge increase" in malicious activity over the past 6 months.
According to her, hackers acting in the interests of Beijing are hacking home routers to use them for further attacks on technology organizations and cloud services, the army, the government and other structures.
Researchers have already counted more than 100 hacker groups linked to the Chinese authorities.
Meta, in its quarterly report on current cyber threats, reported that it has blocked 4,789 fake Facebook accounts*in recent months. These accounts violated the company's anti-disinformation policy.
As Meta found out, the operators of fake accounts used other people's names and photos, posing as Americans and distributing the same content on different platforms.
Their posts often consisted of texts copied from random accounts on X (formerly Twitter) and the media. They also shared real people's posts on Facebook, probably to gain the trust of other users.
Although some of the content was political, there were also posts on other topics - about games, history, models, and animals.
There is no direct evidence that the suspicious accounts were linked to China. However, in mid-2023, the Meta team noticed that some of them changed their nicknames and avatars from American to Indian.
After the change of location, scammers began to spread misinformation about the Dalai Lama, liking and commenting on the corresponding posts.
Meta found similar content in 13 other Facebook accounts and 7 groups, which were also blocked as part of an anti-propaganda campaign.
According to Meta, the attackers were still based in China and primarily conducted activities against India and Tibet, as well as partially against the United States.
At the same time, Google announced more frequent cyber attacks from China on Taiwanese organizations. The company's senior engineer, Kate Morgan, spoke about a "huge increase" in malicious activity over the past 6 months.
According to her, hackers acting in the interests of Beijing are hacking home routers to use them for further attacks on technology organizations and cloud services, the army, the government and other structures.
Researchers have already counted more than 100 hacker groups linked to the Chinese authorities.
