Turkey’s Government Tried to Hack Hundreds of Protesters Over Twitter, Researchers Say

Hackers—apparently working for the Turkish government— attempted to infect a large number of Turkish dissidents and protesters by spreading spyware on Twitter, according to a new report by digital rights organization Access Now. The organization’s researchers found seven new samples of spyware made by the infamous surveillance tech vendor FinFisher. One of them targeted several Turkish protesters who attended a large series of protests against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in June and July 2017, known as the March for Justice, according to the report.

FinFisher exposed: A researcher’s tale of defeating traps, tricks, and complex virtual machines

FinFisher is such a complex piece of malware that, like other researchers, we had to devise special methods to crack it. We needed to do this to understand the techniques FinFisher uses to compromise and persist on a machine, and to validate the effectiveness of Office 365 ATP detonation sandbox, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP) generic detections, and other Microsoft security solutions.