There has already been 25,000 email address along with passwords that have been the property of the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, and also the National Institute of Health that have been reported stolen and posted online by certain activists! This data dump was later on discovered by a certain SITE Intelligence Group, which routinely tracks the online activity of certain white-supremacist and jihadist groups, which later reported that this leak was an attempt by these activists to weaponize the whole COVID-19 pandemic.
Washington Post reports that although its origin is still unclear, experts have already found the information on the online platform 4chan, a message board that is already popular for hateful content, as well as Twitter and on an extremist channel on a certain messaging app called Telegram.
The gathered information by the hackers
The particular information that the hackers and neo-Nazi groups were able to gather was reportedly taken with the very purpose of sharing certain coronavirus conspiracy theories, which include linking this virus to the HIV virus. The World Health Organization gave a confirmation to the DailyMail.com that the particular email addresses that were registered in certain external systems and applications were then hacked and made public, but the passwords have already been reset for the identified compromised accounts.
There is already a smaller amount of credentials that were identified to be associated with the charity known as the Gates Foundation, a certain private philanthropic group that was co-founded with Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates, which has just announced a particular $150 million in additional funding with hopes of combating the pandemic.
Read Also: Iran Launches First Military Satellite into Space: Could this Point to Missile Development?
The DailyMail.com has already reached out to both the NIH and Gates Foundation for their response or comments but none have been received as of the moment. The total list for the World Health Organization otherwise known as WHO has reached 2,732.
A certain WHO spokesperson has previously told DailyMail.com that on April 21, the organization's email addresses that were registered to external systems, as well as applications, were compromised and made public. The spokesperson later continued by saying that 6,835 of the email addresses were then made public, but out of these email addresses, there were online 2,712 WHO email addresses, including 457 valid and active addresses.
The cybersecurity team and their response
The cybersecurity team by WHO then ran a certain verification program just to check the exposed email addresses along with passwords against the authentication services which resulted in finding out that none of the 457 WHO credentials have actually been compromised. As a particular precaution, the passwords have now been reset for all of those 457 users whose email addresses were confirmed as exposed.
SITE then told Business Insider that the compromised information was being used by certain extremist groups in order to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation about the ongoing pandemic.
Even the SITE's executive director, Rita Katz, has said that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists have published this information "aggressively" all across the various online platforms, using this information to call for a certain "harassment campaign" by using the compromised emails to share conspiracies about the whole coronavirus pandemic.
