Who’s Malicious Now?
State-sponsored hacking targets Uyghur Muslims by the thousands. The MadHATTERS Editorial, 03 September 2019
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State-sponsored hacking has been luring hundreds of thousands of Uyghur citizens to a website in China that installs malware on their iPhones. That malware can infiltrate the visitors’ whole device — near-real time location information, text messages, GPS, logins, passwords, etc are sent from infected devices to whoever’s holding the reins on this attack site.
China’s minority Muslims have been targeted by the state for decades. As many as a million have been detained in the past year, according to a UN human rights committee, and the efforts are now moving online. Google, who first discovered the attack, noted that the malicious sites had thousands of visitors per week. Those visitors were tricked into clicking a link on the site, and then their phone data was hoovered into a (likely Chinese) server somewhere.
The surveillance state we rail against is so commonly capitalist that it’s easy to forget our malicious governments sometimes. Profiling-for-hire, as used by the Russians (and whoever else) in Western elections is so unlikely to be the bulk of the iceberg — there are acres of malice sitting underneath what we can easily see, and this ethnic-targeting-by iPhone-attack is a good example.
Since the story first broke (by TechCrunch — kudos) it was confirmed by Forbes and supplemented by insight that there were sites targeting Android users as well. Thousands of visitors each week to these sites means entire Muslim Chinese populations could have been affected, and as Cambridge Analytica has shown us, marginal data on that wealth of a population can be used to create very powerful profiles for nefarious manipulation.
A sophisticated state with all the data it needs. What could go wrong?
MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by the Hub of All Things. Learn more about the HAT, subscribe, or read more MadHATTERs online at www.hubofallthings.com
