A group cyber criminals tried to hack accounts Facebook He posted videos asking Ukrainian military personnel and the Ukrainian military to surrender. Aim, Facebook’s parent company.

According to the investigation, this campaign was carried out by a group known as UNC1151 which is affiliated with the Belarusian government.

A February security update from Meta identified the activity of this group called “ghost writers”. or ghost writer. Since then, the group has attempted to compromise “dozens” of accounts, although it has only been successful in a few cases.

These aggressors are phishing encouraging their victims to click links that lead them to malicious sites to steal their passwords.

Cybercriminals were able to post videos containing fake messages that appeared to come from affected accounts, but Meta said it prevented further sharing of such content.

“These dangerous actors are not going to give up,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said at a press conference. “And they tend to combine more and more different approaches,” he added.

In addition to the attacks mentioned above, Various other actions taken by pro-Russian actors are also detailed in the company’s report.. Meta even claimed that a group tried to organize a protest event against the Polish government in Warsaw, but the event and the account that created it were quickly taken offline.

The platform has to deal not only with the already classic disinformation campaigns over networks over fake accounts, but also with other tactics. mobbing or chase.

200 accounts deleted in Russia

Meta removed a network of 200 accounts in Russia especially for making massive false accusations against Ukrainian and Russian individuals.

The network worked with fake, duplicate and real accounts, whose behavior was detected by the platform’s automated systems.. In its report, the company states that aggregate reporting efforts increased in mid-February, just before the invasion of Ukraine.

Regarding misconduct distributed in a coordinated manner, the company removed a relatively “small” network using fake accounts (27 from Facebook and four from Instagram, although it also has a presence on other platforms) to attack users from Ukraine, where it operates with Russia.

Meta associates this network with another qualifying network that operated in Russia, Ukraine’s Donbas and Crimea two years ago.

The technology company has also updated its operations in Ukraine. In this regard, he emphasized that in addition to spam networks using deceptive tactics to attract public attention to the ongoing war, there have been attempts to return to the platform by state and non-state actors who were previously removed from the platform.

cyber espionage

In response, Meta detected two cyber espionage campaigns in Iran, one is for key industries and infrastructures of industries, such as energy, telecommunications, maritime logistics or information technology; and is run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and against civil society in Azerbaijan.

In South America, the company interrupted operations in Brazil, Costa Rica and El Salvador due to coordinated inauthentic behavior.

On the other hand, in the Philippines, it has removed tens of thousands of accounts, pages and groups worldwide to distribute a network responsible for shutting down websites and harming them, as well as a spam campaign to monetize people’s attention regarding the upcoming future. elections in the country.