Neo-Nazis spread list of emails and passwords for WHO and Gates Foundation employees
Extremists ‘calling for a harassment campaign while sharing conspiracy theories’ about pandemic, intelligence group says
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Your support makes all the difference.Neo-Nazis are spreading nearly 25,000 email addresses and passwords belonging to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Gates Foundation and other groups fighting the coronavirus outbreak.
The SITE intelligence group, which monitors both far-right and Islamist terror groups, said the data dump was released on Sunday and Monday.
It was then used to facilitate hacking and harassment attempts by far-right extremists, the group added.
“Neo-Nazis and white supremacists capitalised on the lists and published them aggressively across their venues,” Rita Katz, SITE’s executive director, told The Washington Post.
“Using the data, far-right extremists were calling for a harassment campaign while sharing conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic.
“The distribution of these alleged email credentials were just another part of a months-long initiative across the far right to weaponise the Covid-19 pandemic.”
More than 9,000 emails and passwords included in the data were from the US National Institutes of Health, while more than 6,800 were from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 5,120 from the World Bank and 2,732 from the WHO.
Other entries were from the Gates Foundation, co-founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, which recently announced a $150m fund to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.
The data has been shared on 4chan and then forwarded on Twitter and extremist channels on the messaging app Telegram.
Information allegedly gained from using the emails and passwords has already been used for disinformation purposes, the Post reported, linking the coronavirus outbreak to HIV.
Far-right groups have sought to spread disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic and stoke discord, through sharing conspiracy theories and encouraging protests against lockdown measures.
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