Facebook said on Wednesday that China-based hackers used the social media platform as part of a campaign to hack and spy on Uighur diasporas, the minority group the country has been accused of placing in “reeducation” camps.
Hackers used Facebook to identify, track and send malicious links to Uighur activists, dissidents and journalists living in the United States, Australia, Canada and Turkey, among other countries, Facebook said.
Facebook did not directly blame the Chinese government for sponsoring the campaign. “We can see the geographic assignment based on the activity, but we can’t really prove who is behind the operation,” said the company’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, in a phone call to journalists.
But Facebook said the hackers are part of the same operation that cybersecurity company Volexity cited in 2019 as being affiliated with the Chinese government. He published a survey that revealed that the country’s hackers took extreme measures to hack and spy on Uighurs. They used sophisticated and previously unknown tools to upload malicious code to various Uighur news sites, so they would hack and spy on almost every smartphone visited.
“Who else would have the resources, the time and the effort to go after these people? If you told me that it is Iceland, I would be very surprised, ”said Volexity CEO Steven Adair, in a phone call on Wednesday.
Some of the research on hackers came from cybersecurity company Mandiant, Facebook said.
“We believe this was sponsored by the Chinese government,” said John Hultquist, Mandiant’s chief threat intelligence officer, in a phone call.
He added that hacking and spying on phones has become a staple of China’s tactics against people the country wants to track.
“This is not going to stop,” said Hultquist. “If you’re a security service, accessing these cell phones is really great. Not only can you access your digital lives, but you can also read their SMS, physically locate them and turn on their speaker. “
Facebook’s cyber espionage chief, Mike Dvilyanski, said in the link that while he found and removed less than 500 accounts that sent malicious links to Uighurs, it was “an extremely targeted operation”.
“We were seeing them create Facebook personas designed to look like journalists who focus on issues critical to the Uighur community, who are designed to look like activists who can defend the Uighur community, designed to look like community members,” he said. Dvilyanski. “So use this as a way to trick them into clicking on these links to expose your devices.”
Several investigative reports have shown that China maintains re-education camps that hold about 1 million Uighurs, an ethnic group based mainly in the northwestern Xinjiang region. With ubiquitous cameras, facial recognition technology and intense collection of resident data, it is one of the most watched areas in the world.
Beijing has repeatedly denied any mistreatment of its Uighur minority, and called the claims of its hacking efforts “unfounded”.
Dozens of countries have jointly condemned China’s treatment of Uighurs, and the White House sanctioned two Chinese officials for them on Monday.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nury Turkel, a longtime Uighur rights activist and member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, said in a phone call that knowing that his phone could be taken over by state-sponsored hackers is distressing.
“Imagine that the government is monitoring your communication, invading your privacy, and you want to call your parents to speak to them,” he said. “You can’t say anything other than ‘How are you, have you been taking your pills, how’s your blood sugar level? ‘ Nothing else.”
“This is one of the ways in which China finds a way to create anxiety, a feeling of despair, a feeling of hopelessness, a feeling of insecurity,” said Turkel.