A group of Chinese hackers have targeted a Taiwanese news organizations and the opposition Democratic Progressive Party in order to get the information on upcoming presidential and legislative election like the policies and speeches from the leaders participating in the elections. This report is the second part of the one revealed by FireEye last week which exposed China spying on the Japanese government using Dropbox. China was also blamed for spying on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong with an Android spyware disguised as an OccupyCentral app to keep an eye on the protesters. FireEye in August 2015 caught Chinese hackers spying on Tibetan activists and as well as dozens of organizations in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan. The hackers attacked their targets through phishing emails; one of the emails had this subject line: “DPP’s Contact Information Update,” which indicated this to be a state-sponsored attack from a group known as “APT16” according to the security research team “FireEye”.
The hackers in all the emails tried to lure victims into installing something or clicking on the links inside the mail to allow them to install malicious code into victim’s PC.
Taiwan will be having elections on 16th of next month and it’s likely that DPP will win the elections. China, by hacking into party’s systems may want to know their plans after the elections as it considers Taiwan to be their province.
One of the intelligence Analysts from FireEye said: “There’re a lot of people in China who want and need information for their own intelligence purposes.”
Full Article: Chinese Hackers Caught Spying on Taiwan Prior To Upcoming Elections.