At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Read more…
Source: Reuters
Related:
- India-Estonia Cyber Security Pact to Combat Growing Threat from Chinese Hackers
May 25, 2024
An Indian contingent was, for the first time, observers in an NATO-run cyber security exercise in Estonia this month. The exercise, the equivalent of an cyber Olympiad, was the largest exercise of its kind in Europe, Tiit Riisalo, Estonian economic affairs and information technology minister, said. Exercise Locked Shields involved 32 NATO countries and a handful ...
- Massive COMB data breach reveals info on over a billion people
May 14, 2024
Someone is combining information on Chinese citizens leaked in different data breaches into a single database, and has so far made more than 1.2 billion records. This compilation of many breaches (COMB) contains plenty of sensitive user information, including phone numbers, postal addresses, ID card numbers, and more. Researchers claim they spotted an unprotected database on ...
- Thousands affected by cyber attack on Hong Kong college
May 10, 2024
Over 8,000 students of a private vocational college have been affected by a cyber attack, the privacy watchdog said on Friday. The Hong Kong College of Technology said its information technology network and file server were hacked in February. A ransomware group is believed to have got hold of 450GB of the college’s data and the ...
- Washington Takes Its Cyber Strategy Global
May 8, 2024
The United States has spent two years supporting Ukraine in one ground war and seven months backing Israel in another, and it continues to prepare for the possibility of a third in Taiwan. But arguably its most persistent focus has been on a far longer-running, more perennial, borderless battle over cyberspace and the future of technology. ...
- China suspected of hacking UK armed forces payroll
May 7, 2024
The government suspects China was behind the hack of an armed forces payroll system, the BBC understands. Defence Secretary Grant Shapps will not identify a specific culprit when he addresses MPs today, but is expected to warn of the dangers posed by cyber espionage from hostile states. The system used by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) ...
- Governments issue alerts after ‘sophisticated’ state-backed actor found exploiting flaws in Cisco security boxes
April 25, 2024
A previously unknown and “sophisticated” nation-state group compromised Cisco firewalls as early as November 2023 for espionage purposes — and possibly attacked network devices made by other vendors including Microsoft, according to warnings from the networking giant and three Western governments. A Cisco spokesperson declined to comment on which country the snooping crew – tracked as ...