Category Archives: myanmar

An espionage campaign spread its wings from Myanmar to the Philippines, raising new questions

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A cyberespionage campaign that spread through Myanmar last fall at first looked like many others of the genre: a handpicked set of targets affected by highly tailored break-in methods. After all, scattershot attacks historically are not only less likely to hit valuable victims, but they also equal a greater chance of being caught and halted before the hackers gather the information they want. Then something changed, according to the security firm Kaspersky. What began as a small campaign — ultimately affecting approximately 100 Myanmar victims that Kaspersky identified — leapfrogged to another country, the Philippines, where the victim count exploded to 1,400 and included some government entities. Kaspersky researchers on Wednesday detailed the extent of the campaign, and who they believe is behind it. But they remain unsure why it evolved the way it did, even if they have some informed guesses. The investigators attributed the infections to a group […]

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Amid military coup, Myanmar’s internet is partially blacked out

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Internet connectivity dropped precipitously in Myanmar on Monday as the military seized power, likely the result of the government shutting down access in a move that drew condemnation from President Joe Biden and digital freedom activists. The Myanmar military detained senior civilian politicians, including President U Win Myint and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party won a majority of parliamentary seats in the November elections. A military-owned television network said Commander-in-Chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing would assume control of the nation for one year following the military’s allegations that the elections were fraudulent. NetBlocks, which tracks digital freedom, said connectivity fell in Myanmar by 50% at one point before later recovering to 75% of ordinary levels. The disruption pattern pointed to a centrally issued blackout order to telecommunications providers, NetBlocks said. The outage accompanied a reported Army order to shutdown state media and the disabling of phone […]

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Facebook removes fake accounts it linked to Turning Point USA

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Facebook said it removed hundreds of fake accounts and pages on Thursday that had denigrated Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden while boosting GOP President Donald Trump. The company also said it had banned a marketing agency as part of the influence operation that it linked to prominent, youth-driven conservative organization Turning Point USA. The marketing firm, Rally Forge, also worked to undermine mail-in voting with comments on news stories posted to its platform, Facebook said. In all, the social media giant took down 200 Facebook accounts and 55 pages, as well as 76 Instagram accounts. The removal is a reminder that, with just weeks before Election Day, social media companies still are contending with the deliberate spread of misinformation from both foreign and domestic sources. Facebook in recent months has taken action against networks of white supremacists, and alleged Russian propagandists, among other networks. Other Silicon Valley firms, such as Twitter, also have taken […]

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Public disclosure didn’t stop suspected Chinese hackers from targeting the Vatican

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Hackers with suspected ties to the Chinese government kept up their operations in the weeks after they were caught targeting the Vatican, according to Recorded Future findings published Tuesday. Recorded Future researchers first called out the hacking group’s focus on the Vatican and Hong Kong’s Catholic Diocese in July, after which the hackers appeared to briefly pause their activity, in a likely effort to evade detection. But within two weeks, the hackers, known as RedDelta, had resumed their activities, aiming to infiltrate mail servers of the Vatican and the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese, researchers said. “This is indicative of RedDelta’s persistence in maintaining access to these environments for gathering intelligence, in addition to the group’s aforementioned high risk tolerance,” the researchers write in a blog post on the matter. China has long had an interest in collecting intelligence on religious groups in the region, and in particular on Catholics, ever since the Vatican […]

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The latest in Facebook’s dragnet: Propaganda from Russian military intelligence

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Facebook on Wednesday announced the removal of three networks of accounts it had determined were operating on behalf of foreign governments, including a number of pages that the company tied to Russian intelligence services. Researchers found a network of 78 accounts, 11 Pages, 29 groups and four Instagram pages that often posted about news such as Russia’s involvement in Syria and the downing of the Malaysian airliner MH17 and also had links to Russian military intelligence services, the company said. Sometimes, the account holders misrepresented themselves as citizen journalists, and contacted policymakers, reporters and other known figures in the region who could help amplify their content, Facebook said in a blog post. The other networks originated in Iran, where operators also impersonated journalists, and Vietnam and Myanmar, where the Burmese telecommunications company MyTel, which is indirectly owned by the Burmese and Vietnamese militaries, engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” These takedowns are […]

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On eve of US elections, Facebook blocked 115 accounts engaged in ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’

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Just hours before the US mid-term elections opened, Facebook responded to a tip from law enforcement agencies and shut down 115 accounts that were behaving suspiciously, and potentially linked to a foreign entity.
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Facebook bans Myanmar general as U.N. calls for independent investigation into Rohingya crisis

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Faced with continued ethnic violence in Myanmar, Facebook banned the country’s commander-in-chief, the military’s television network and dozens of pages and accounts followed by almost 12 million people, the company announced on Monday. Earlier on the same day, a United Nations fact finding mission in Myanmar called for an independent investigation of Facebook’s role in what the mission’s report describes as a genocide against the Rohingya ethnic minority, directed in large part by Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. The U.N. investigators found that “Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where for most users Facebook is the Internet” and that the company has been “slow and ineffective” in response to the ongoing crisis. Earlier this year, a U.N. investigator said Facebook’s primary role in directing hate and inciting violence against the Rohingya showed the platform had “turned into a beast.” “The ethnic violence in […]

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