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Federal authorities are offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of a Russian cyber group that hacked thousands of Signal and WhatsApp accounts of investigative journalists and US government officials.
The operation has been active since March, when the FBI published it advice warning of an ongoing fraud campaign targeting high-value criminals linked to Russian intelligence agencies. Messages that appear to be connecting to a support system ask that users click on a link or provide verification codes or account passwords. If the user follows through, they unwittingly connect the attacker’s device to their account or have their account hijacked and locked out.
Thousands of accounts have already been hacked
With this, the attackers can read any new messages sent to the compromised account. Security built into Signal, however, prevents attackers from reading any previous conversations. The messages are sent to “highly-intelligent individuals, such as US government officials, military, political leaders, and the media.”
Last week, the FBI published it change it that the campaign is done. In addition to trying to send as helper bots to try to trick recipients into connecting their account to the attacker’s device, these messages also encourage users to create a backup of all previous connections by following these instructions. The following message instructs applicants to submit a long passcode used to encrypt backups stored on Signal’s servers. With this, the attackers have the opportunity to negotiate the previous Signal. The update said the two Russian government-controlled batches were tracked as UNC5792 and UNC4221.
One message contains words similar to the following:
The signal is here
Recently, attempts to hack users of our messenger and the connection of third-party tools to the account have become more frequent.
A joint investigation by the US government and its European partners revealed that the attacks on the accounts were carried out by hackers from Iran and the former Soviet Union.
For this reason, Signal is updating its Terms of Service & Privacy Policy, and introducing two-factor authentication for users.
In order not to lose your messages and media, set up your backup (Settings -> Backup -> Start backup -> View recovery key -> Copy to clipboard -> Next -> Enter recovery key -> Next -> Continue -> Choose your backup plan).
Click the “Accept” button in the pop-up and stay tuned for security updates on our messenger.
Stay safe and thankful for using a highly secure messenger with end-to-end encryption.
If you have any questions, post /support
Some words look like this:
