�WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th March, 2021) Facebook has taken action against a group of hackers in China who were targeting dissidents, mostly Uyghurs from Xinjiang province, the company's head of Cyber Espionage Investigations Mike Dvilyanski and Head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher said on Wednesday.
"Today, we're sharing actions we took against a group of hackers in China known in the security industry as Earth Empusa or Evil Eye - to disrupt their ability to use their infrastructure to abuse our platform, distribute malware and hack people's accounts across the internet. They targeted activists, journalists and dissidents predominantly among Uyghurs from Xinjiang in China primarily living abroad in Turkey, Kazakhstan, the United States, Syria, Australia, Canada and other countries," Dvilyanski and Gleicher said in a statement.
Facebook disrupted the Chinese hackers' operation by blocking malicious domains from being shared on its platform, took down the group's accounts and notified the targeted individuals.
The hackers set up malicious websites that used look-alike domains for popular Uyghur and Turkish news sites or they compromised legitimate websites frequently visited by their targets, some websites contained malicious javascript code.
Facebook said it found that the Chinese firms Beijing Best United Technology Co., Ltd. and Dalian 9Rush Technology Co., Ltd. are behind some of the Android malware used by the hackers.
