UPSC Articles
ModifiedElephant
Part of: Prelims and GS-III cybersecurity
Context: American cybersecurity firm SentinelOne has released a report on ModifiedElephant.
- It is a hacking group that allegedly planted incriminating evidence on the personal devices of Indian journalists, human rights activists, human rights defenders, academics and lawyers.
Key takeaways from the report
- According to the report, ModifiedElephant maliciously targeted specific groups and individuals, including the activists arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case of 2018.
- It called the incident ‘one of the most serious cases of evidence tampering’ that the firm had ever encountered.
- ModifiedElephant operators have been infecting their targets using spear phishing emails with malicious file attachments over the last decade, with their techniques getting more sophisticated over time.
- Spear phishing refers to the practice of sending emails to targets that look like they are coming from a trusted source to either reveal important information or install different kinds of malware on their computer systems.
News source: IE
