Government Hackers Are Targeting Public; 12,000 Warned

Google threat analysis group has revealed a report that from July to September they have sent more than 12,000 warnings across 149 countries that government backend attackers are targeting them. Threat analysis group (TAG) “counter targeted and government-backed hacking against Google and our users.” These warnings are roughly equated to (+10%/ -10% ) the number of notices sent in 2018 and 2017.

Google has been sending a direct warning to users if they think that their google account is being targeted by government-backed hackers.

These attacks can be triggered in any form. It can be malicious software, link to a phishing website to steal private credentials; mostly, they are in the way of PDf files, Office documents, RAR files.

Google has shared a rough idea about these attacks.

TAG continuously tracks more than 270 targeted or government-backed hackers from more than 50 countries. These groups can have many goals, including cyber-attacks, stealing information, or spying on their behaviors.

Most of the users are targeted by credential phishing emails to steal their sensitive information. Journalists, human right activist, and political campaigns are at high risk.

Over 90 per cent of these users were targeted via ‘credential phishing emails’ these are usually attempting to obtain the target’s password or other account credentials to hijack their account

Threat Analysis Group

Phishing attacks on India have been on a peak. Associated to cyber-attacks in India Minister of State for Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology Sanjay Dhotre,

According to the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), 50,362; 53,117; 208,456; and 313,649 cybersecurity incidents, including phishing, network scanning and probing, virus/malicious code, and website hacking are reported during the years 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 (till October), respectively.

Recently a month ago a controversy is made related to WhatsApp on Pegasus, spyware developed by Israel based NSO Group which activates on sending the call even without answering the call the malicious code gets injected into the WhatsApp.