Federal authorities are offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of a Russian state cyber group that has compromised thousands of Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to investigative reporters and US government employees.
The operation has been active since at least March, when the FBI published an advisory warning of ongoing phishing campaigns targeting high-value targets by attackers associated with Russian intelligence services. Messages masquerading as automated support communications ask that users click a link or provide verification codes or account passcodes. In the event the user complies, they unknowingly link the attacker's device to their account or have their account completely taken over and are locked out.
Além do Facebook e Instagram, os problemas estão a afetar outras plataformas da Meta, incluindo o Messenger. A empresa está a trabalhar para resolver as falhas, embora ainda sem avançar com uma explicação para o sucedido.
A decisão foi tomada pela Comissão Europeia e a empresa dona do WhatsApp tem agora 5 dias para obedecer, A Meta vai mesmo ter de repor ao acesso de assistentes de IA à aplicação de mensagens.
De acordo com os investigadores da Kaspersky, o WhatsApp, o Facebook e os SMS estão entre os principais canais usados pelos cibercriminosos, que recorrem cada vez mais à IA para tornar as burlas mais credíveis e difíceis de detetar.
The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed.
Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are encrypted on a sender’s device with keys that are available only to the receiver's. By definition, E2EE means that no one else—including the platform itself—can read the plaintext messages.
In sworn testimony before two US Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta does “not see any of the content in WhatsApp; it is fully encrypted” and that “Facebook systems do not see the content of messages being transferred over WhatsApp.” The engine for this E2EE is the Signal protocol, an open source code base that multiple third-party experts have said lives up to its promises.