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Dark Caracal’s Spying Program Created for Compromising Android Devices

 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation a civil rights syndicate doing works digitally and Lookout a cyber-security company jointly prepared a report and issued on January 21 which states that one sinister hacking campaign was found being run from certain building in Beirut that the Lebanese General Directorate of General Security owned. The hacking scheme, believably operating since 2012, steals files, call logs and text messages from corporations, military members, journalists as well as other targets across twenty one countries.

 

Reportedly, the hackers' malicious program getting distributed through the Dark Caracal hacking campaign is chiefly used to masquerade as mobile devices' protected chat messaging programs like WhatsApp and Signal which seemingly functions as the real applications except that they're contaminated with malware. Upon installation of these fake applications, cyber-crooks become capable of using the Android device of a victim for taking photos, recording audios, recovering location information along with other activities.

 

The researchers think it's difficult to track Dark Caracal understandably running for the past 6 years because there are various types of unrelated espionage schemes working from a common set of websites. According to the researchers, down the years, the activities of Dark Caracal have gotten wrongly attributed to other online criminal gangs, again and again.

 

Because of a large number of diverse espionage schemes emerging out of the same web addresses, the aforementioned malicious program created for mobile devices slipped out of researchers' radar completely, causing an extremely worrisome trend, particularly knowing such apps can be proliferated globally devoid of plentiful repercussions. Themerkle.com posted this, January 21, 2018.

 

During the month of November, Telegram and WhatsApp were banned in Afghanistan with the purpose to prevent extremists towards utilizing encrypted messaging.

 

According to researchers, Dark Caracal happens to be merely another global hacker utilizing the particular infrastructure. Among the wrong attributions of Dark Caracal's activities to other online criminal gangs, the 2016 Operation Manual report of EFF wrongly identified spying operations from Dark Caracal's servers to be originating from Appin a security firm in India.

 

From the acquired data, it's clear the targets aren't chosen randomly, suggesting some nation-state maybe backing the hacking scheme.

» SPAMfighter News - 1/29/2018

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