Google unveils attempts to piracy the mail

Abdel Rahman Ahmed-Cairo

Egyptian media and artist Abdullah El Sherif revealed that his e-mail on Google has been subjected to government-backed piracy attempts.

Sharif posted on his Twitter page a picture showing a warning from Google saying it had discovered attackers backed by a government trying to steal the email password of the Egyptian opposition.

Abdullah Al-Sherif, the presenter of satirical programs on the Internet, has been subjected to smear campaigns by the Egyptian regime's media in the recent period, especially after he published leaks showing the palaces and buildings mentioned by the Egyptian actor and contractor Mohamed Ali, which he said was a waste of public funds.

Since 2012, Google has adopted a new system based on monitoring suspicious login attempts and sending warnings to users if their accounts are subject to government-backed hacking attempts.

The move aimed to make it harder to target authoritarian regimes by penetrating their own contacts, company officials said.

Electronic Army

This comes as Mohamed Ali revealed in an interview with the Middle East website on Tuesday that he is implementing a multi-storey building used by the Sisi system to house what Sisi called the electronic army to monitor social media.

In early October, one of the world's largest cybersecurity companies revealed that cyberattacks targeted prominent Egyptian political activists, rights activists, lawyers, journalists and academics years ago from Egyptian government offices.

The New York Times quoted a report by "Check Point Software Technologies" (Check Point Software Technologies) that the central server used in the attacks was registered on behalf of the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, and that the geographic coordinates contained in one of the applications used to track activists correspond to the headquarters of the device Egyptian General Intelligence.

According to the Check Point report, the cyberattack began in 2016, targeting an unknown number of victims, but the company identified 33 people - mostly well-known figures in civil society and the opposition - who were targeted in one part of the process I discovered.

Two activists targeted during the cyberattack discovered by the security company, Hassan Nafaa, a political science professor at Cairo University, and Khaled Daoud, a journalist and former Constitution Party leader, were arrested.

Target opponents

In March 2019, Amnesty International revealed in a report that it monitored cyber-attacks supported by government agencies targeting Egyptian civil society organizations through external applications.

According to the Amnesty report, the attacks include multiple attempts to access e-mail accounts of several prominent Egyptian jurists, employees of media organizations, and civil society organizations.

Amnesty International revealed at the time that Google sent many alerts to the target warnings of attacks by the state, and concluded that the international human rights organization that the Egyptian authorities or those behind the attacks.

In the Egyptian attacks discovered by Amnesty, attempts to access the email accounts of the targeted people through a cunning version of phishing were known as OAuth (essentially a legitimate service that allows third-party applications to directly access the user's account). The goal is to trick users into giving permissions to malicious apps that enable them to access and view email content.

Google's original warning messages differ from similar phishing attacks, in that the first appears to the user as a warning in their account interface, not an email sent with suspicious links.

Traditional phishing attacks try to trick the target with messages with links to a fake login page for sites like Google or Facebook, and try to persuade him to enter his password for the attacker to obtain.

This type of phishing attack can be prevented through the use of double-check and security keys.