A second senior Australian government minister has revealed that his mobile phone was hacked through the Telegram messaging app, with a media report saying that the phishing scam aimed to uncover contact details of pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong.
Australian Minister for Health Greg Hunt’s office said in an e-mailed statement yesterday that “a cybersecurity attempt to impersonate the minister has been referred to the Australian Federal Police [AFP] and investigations are underway.”
That follows Monday’s statement by Australian Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment Simon Birmingham that he had been targeted.
The Australian late on Wednesday reported that the details of pro-democracy Hong Kongers were provided to someone impersonating Birmingham, with one of the recipients being asked: “Do you have any contacts in Hong Kong?”
The person handed over details of Hong Kongers without realizing that they were speaking to a hacker, the paper said, citing a person that it did not identify.
Birmingham told a parliamentary hearing yesterday that the hacker had gained access to his government phone and contacts who had the Telegram app.
The person pretending to be the minister also sent a request asking for money to be transferred to a bank account outside Australia, he said.
“The AFP are seeking to, through their data security processes, attempting to ascertain how any data was secured and are working to try to get Telegram to shut down the false account,” Birmingham said, as shown by a transcript sent from his office.
The phishing campaign, which was first reported to authorities on Thursday last week, originated with WhatsApp, the AFP said in an advisory circulated among government employees yesterday.
The warning said that the scam “presents as a request from a trusted colleague. Victims have been targeted through WhatsApp and asked to download Telegram for ‘further communication.’”
The WhatsApp message also asked recipients to forward two-factor authentication codes to the sender following the Telegram install — a breach that should have raised flags with recipients.
The Australian Signals Directorate has declined to comment on the scam.
Telegram has not replied to a message requesting comment sent on Sunday via its Web site or one sent through its app yesterday.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office on Monday said that it does not comment on police matters, while requests seeking comment from other senior ministers on whether they were targeted have not been answered.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees