Jane Edwards
Shane Huntley, head of threat analysis group at Google, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday that Google sent over 12K notifications between July and September to warn users across 149 countries that they were targeted by government-backed threat actors.
Huntley noted that attackers targeted more than 90 percent of those users through “credential phishing emails†to gain access to users’ Google accounts.
He said political campaigns, journalists and other high-risk users are encouraged to sign up for Google’s Advanced Protection Program to protect accounts from phishing and other threats.
Huntley also wrote about disinformation campaigns and his group’s termination of associated Google accounts and YouTube channels to counter such campaigns. One of the campaigns he cited is Russia-backed influence operations group that uses fake news outlets to promote Russian interests in several countries in Africa, including Madagascar, Sudan, South Africa and the Central African Republic.
