Slashdot Mirror
Venezuela's Government Appears To be Trying To Hack Activists With Phishing Pages (vice.com)
Hackers allegedly working for the embattled Venezuelan government tried to trick activists into giving away their passwords to popular services such as Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and others, according to security researchers. From a report: Last week, the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido called for citizens to volunteer with the goal of helping international humanitarian organizations deliver aid into the country. President Nicolas Maduro is refusing to accept aid and has erected blocks across a border bridge with Colombia with the military's help. The volunteer efforts were organized around the website voluntariosxvenezuela.com. A week later, on February 11 someone registered an almost identical domain, voluntariosvenezuela[.]com. And on Wednesday, users in Venezuela who were trying to visit the original and official VoluntariosxVenezuela website were redirected to the newer one, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab, as well as Venezuelan users on Twitter.
Elliot Abrams, the recently named special envoy to Venezuela, has a past of using "aid" shipments to smuggle weapons into countries south of the border, weapons later used to massacre countless civilians, and then lying about it in testimony. No government in its right mind would allow such a shipment. The Red Cross and UN have both decried this maneuver by the US as a political stunt. And Venezuela is in fact currently accepting aid, just not from countries which have a record of both using aid as a Trojan horse for contraband and invading countries after dubiously declaring their governments to be illegitimate.
But why should I expect any of this information to be in a Slashdot summary.