Cambodia: LICADHO Clarifies Hacking Attack Report
Event- Country
- Cambodia
- Initial Date
- May 17, 2018
- Event Description
Last week, LICADHO staff discovered a strange phenomenon when trying to access the Phnom Penh Post website. When visiting the site, a malicious code impersonating Google (misspelled Gooogle) attempted to trick users into granting full access to their Gmail inboxes to an unknown third party called GTransfers. LICADHO analysed the code which was hidden within a legitimate script file (theme.js) hosted on the Phnom Penh Post website and forwarded its findings to partners in the region. The tampering with the website was independently confirmed by cyber security experts - including industry leader FireEye - in an ABC article. [Screenshot of the malicious overlay, as seen on the Phnom Penh Post site, claiming to be Google.] Enlarge this picture Screenshot of the malicious overlay, as seen on the Phnom Penh Post site, claiming to be Google. The presence of the sophisticated code on the Phnom Penh Post website - which was removed within the last 24 hours - can be independently verified through a US-based website called Wayback Machine which allows users to see archived versions of websites across time. As seen on this daily archive for the month of May, starting 8 May, a malicious line of code was present in the script file. The line disappeared on 15 May and LICADHO is no longer targeted by the above-described attack. Dates are all in universal time, which is used by Wayback Machine.
- Impact of Event
- 1
- Gender of HRD
- Other (e.g. undefined, organisation, community)
- Violation
- Online Attack and Harassment
- Rights Concerned
- Online
- HRD
- NGO
- Perpetrator-State
- Unknown
- Perpetrator-Non-State
- Unknown
- Source
- Monitoring Status
- Not active
- Event Location
Latitude: 11.5563738
Longitude: 104.9282099
- Event Location
- Summary for Publications
On 10 May 2018, LICADHO staff discovered a strange phenomenon when trying to access the Phnom Penh Post website. When visiting the site, a malicious code impersonating Google (misspelled Gooogle) attempted to trick users into granting full access to their Gmail inboxes to an unknown third party called GTransfers.