The Turkish hacker group that has recently appeared to infiltrate a handful of high-profile Twitter accounts also coordinated an attack against an Indian diplomat earlier this month, a cybersecurity firm found.
McAfee Advanced Threat Research and its partner SocialSafeGuard says the group known as "Ayyildiz Tim" (AYT) targeted the verified Twitter account of the Indian Ambassador to the United Nations Syed Akabaruddin on January 13, sharing pro-Pakistan and pro-Turkey messages after seizing control of the social media account.
Akabaruddin is the firm's first identified attack. The group then appeared to begin targeting other prominent conservative personalities, including former Fox News hosts Eric Bolling and Greta Van Susteren as well as ex-Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr.
McAfee detected a pattern to the attacks from the evidential crumbs left in their wake.
"Once the accounts were compromised, the attackers direct-messaged the account contacts with propaganda for their cause or with a link to convince them to click on a phishing site that would harvest the Twitter credentials of the victim," the firm wrote in their report, noting that the coding included "several Turkish-language segments."
The report warned that the hacker group could be gaining access to the Twitter accounts by sharing malicious links through other prominent Twitter accounts, warning against opening links before screening them even from known associates.
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