Foreign governments have been trying to hack the messaging accounts of high-ranking European Union officials, the bloc’s cyber defense unit.
The presentation, given to officials from EU national governments in July, lists “account takeover targeting high-ranking officials” as one of the top threats facing the bloc this year.
The presentation is the first official acknowledgment that EU officials were targeted by cyberattacks through messaging apps, after several national cyber agencies flagged an ongoing campaign linked to Russian threat groups earlier this year. The presentation is also the first reported instance in which an EU authority formally links such attacks to a foreign government.
The officials were the targets of so-called “state-sponsored spearphishing,” the presentation said, a term for state-backed, targeted and bespoke campaigns to get specific people to click on dodgy links or open malicious attachments. Hackers used “social engineering techniques” to trick EU officials, crafting personalized messages that were more likely to get targets to take the bait.
The agencies warned then that hackers were posing as a fake Signal support chatbot to persuade users to share their codes, allowing them to take over an account to read incoming communications and group chats.
EU cybersecurity officials said in the presentation that the bloc’s institutions had faced eight “significant incidents” so far this year. One key challenge, they flagged, is that the different EU institutions still use different technical cybersecurity solutions and lack a common solution to exchange sensitive and classified documents.