Research from Recorded Future presents details on China's social media influence operations targeted at the West. The operations differ from Russia's influence campaigns based on the countries' different national goals. Russia's operations are primarily "disruptive and destabilizing," while China's are "largely positive and coordinated." Chinese information operations are meant, researchers say, to present an "overwhelmingly positive, benign, and cooperative image of China" to Western users. These campaigns don't show a large-scale interest in swaying foreign elections; rather, they focus on changing opinions about policies that are disadvantageous to China's goals. The researchers found that just two Chinese influence profiles on Instagram "reached a level of audience engagement roughly one-sixth as large as the entire Russian IRA-associated campaign targeting the United States on Instagram."
The Washington Times claims that the United States has begun conducting counter-cyberattacks against China in retaliation for Chinese cyberespionage. The US hacks are likely targeting trade secrets related to Chinese missile technology.
Amnesty International says the Egyptian government is responsible for a wave of spear phishing attacks that targeted activists within the country, ZDNet notes. Government-backed attackers created third-party apps to launch OAuth phishing attacks against victims' Gmail accounts. They also targeted Yahoo, Outlook and Hotmail users. The list of targeted individuals had "significant overlaps" with those targeted in a 2017 campaign which was also linked to Egyptian state-sponsored actors.
Security researchers found more than 808 million email records in an internet-connected MongoDB instance without a password. Millions of the records included sensitive personal information as well.
