
According to recent reports, the malicious websites used to hack iPhones in the last two years actually targeted Uyghur Muslims in China.
Informed sources have reported that the websites were part of a government-sponsored attack targeting Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province. It is possible that the Chinese government is behind these attacks.
These attacks are part of the efforts of the Chinese government to suppress the Muslim minority of the Uyghur region, which has been carried out for the past few years. Last year, Beijing sent more than a million Uighur Muslims to mass camps.
Uighur Muslims
Google researchers recently identified and stopped these malicious websites, however, until this report, it was not clear which group their attacks were targeting. The launch of these websites is part of a campaign to target religious groups by hacking into iPhones and directing users to trap websites to run malicious code on their phones.
By using this method, hackers gained access to user’s messages and passwords and were able to track their location.
After Google’s action to prevent these gaps, Apple fixed this breach in February of this year in iOS 12.1.4, but the public news of this sabotage campaign was spread in the media during the last week. According to Google, these websites had thousands of weekly visitors in the last two years.
It is not yet clear whether these websites were used to attack Android users or not.