A thread on the recent Meta Q1 Adversarial Threat Report. Main key taken always are:

Actions were taken against 3 espionage operations, linked to South Asian countries. These cases involved the APT groups Bahamut (A service for hire group), Patchwork (possibly India state - or "useful idiots" for India) and an unnamed Pakistani state linked group.

Actions were also taken against 6 coordinated inauthentic behavior networks (Public perception management operations), in US, Iran, China, Venezuela, Togo, Georgia and Burkina Farso.

The espionage operations heavily relied on social engineering, by creating profiles that could withstand scrutiny for untrained eyes, posing as journalists, military personal, job recruiters and women looking for romantic relationship. The APT groups also relied on low sophisticated malware, in order to bypass application store (like Google Play Store) scrutiny.

The coordinated inauthentic behavior networks utilized social engineering by pretending to be news media organizations, NGOs and hacktivist groups. These networks were not limited to Facebook only, but also operated on all major social media platforms.

The Iranian public perception management operation (Commonly known as a psyop to the public), claimed to be a hacktivist group which had hacked news organizations, transport organizations, dating services, educational institutions, an airport and a government institution.

Chinese public perception management programs also appears to have begun experimenting with new strategies used by other nations, such as troll farms and using marketing and PR firms. They appear to have shifted towards the public perception methods commonly used by Russia and some Western Countries, like hiring freelance writers and recruiting protestors. Noticeably a China public perception management operation managed to co-opt a NGO in Africa.

#Psyop #China #Iran #US #Russia #Meta