Meta takes down 40 fake accounts of Indian firm, 900 from China for phishing

More than 40 accounts of an Indian firm CyberRoot Risk Advisory were taken down by Meta for providing hacking-for-hire services on its social media platforms.

Apart from that, about 900 fake accounts operated from China by an unknown entity on Instagram and Facebook were also removed, Meta said in its Threat Report on the Surveillance-for-Hire Industry released on December 15.

The company said that these accounts indulged in collecting data of people in Myanmar, India, Taiwan, the US and China, including military personnel, pro-democracy activists, government employees, politicians and journalists.

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"We removed a network of more than 40 accounts on Facebook and Instagram operated by an Indian firm called CyberRoot Risk Advisory Private. Rather than directly sharing malware on our apps, this group's activity manifested primarily in social engineering and phishing, often intended to trick people into giving up their credentials to various online accounts across the internet," the report said.

Meta said that CyberRoot created fake accounts based on fictitious personalities in a bid to deceive the people they targeted. These fake accounts impersonated journalists, business executives and media personalities.

They also sometimes created accounts resembling the targeted people’s families and friends to deceive people, the report said.

"They were focused on business executives, lawyers, doctors, activists, journalists and members of the clergy in countries like Kazakhstan, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Iceland," the report said.

The social media giant assured to weed out spyware vendors around the world, including in China, Russia, Israel, the US and India, who targeted people in about 200 countries and territories.

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