Google’s Threat Analysis Group has confirmed that it has sent over 12,000 warnings to its users targeted by state-sponsored phishing campaigns. The internet juggernaut has also confirmed that governments from the east are showing a lot of interest in launching phishing and disinformation related attacks on the company’s Western users.
Releasing the update in its latest blog post, the web search giant said that its security researchers have found a new cyber threat from a new hacking group dubbed Russian Sandworm. But Google claims that it has taken measures to defend against such attacks and has discovered that a campaign was launched by a Russian firm to tarnish the image of few technology firms from the west with fake news.
Google claimed in its blog post that its analysis has found that hackers were interested in launching credential phishing emails this year to steal account details like passwords since May’19.
The technology giant also claims from its research that the government-backed hacking campaigns have increased over the past 3 years and most of them were launched by Sandworm. In one such campaign which gained the attention of the internet giant, hackers targeted users from South Korea using Android apps modified with spying malware which was downloaded more than 500,000 times and could have targeted at least 100,000 devices.
Also, mobile system developers from Ukraine were being increasingly targeted with spear-phishing emails. And the targets include mostly who developed a larger number of published apps on Google Play Store.
