A team of hackers linked with the Indian army had been using mobile surveillance tools to spy on sensitive targets inside Pakistan and Kashmir, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity company, Lookout, has claimed.
The hacker group is called Confucius that is known for commandeering legitimate applications and web services in South Asia and integrating surveillance tools and malware inside the apps and services for spying.
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According to Lookout’s report, between 2017 and 2020, Confucius had targeted officials of Pakistan’s armed forces, Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority, and Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission on numerous occasions.
The hacker group used to trick victims into installing knock-off web applications disguised as security tools and applications. After that, they penetrated the victims’ devices and extracted the data including recorded phone calls, call logs, contacts, geolocation, images, and voice notes.
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Mobile devices of as many as 156 high-profile Pakistani officials were targeted and the data was stored on unsecured servers. Lookout researchers recently located the servers and found that most users who have been accessing the data are based in Northern India.
Lookout’s Staff Security Intelligence Engineer, Apurva Kumar, has said that Confucius’s technical tools and malware are not that advanced but the threat actor invests human time to gain trust from their targets. And in certain sensitive fields where people are more cautious, it is what makes the difference.
دنیا کی جاہل ترین قوم ہندو بھی اتنے تیز ہو گئے کمال ہے
Soon They Will Have to Face reaction from Paki Hackers in selfdefence but undetected.🇵🇰
All such officials should need to use iphone or better secure phones developed by specially by Huawei or or Chinese giant for secure communication and they must be Google playstore and iphone store free