Looking Inside of the Traffic Cons
21 December, 2022 Demonstrating online impressions is key for media to show their reach and to attract investors and advertisers to their projects. These impressions can be counted as Likes, Views, Subscriptions, or Followers. For websites, Google Analytics is commonly used to track such visibility and online presence over web traffic. Ad fraud is a […]
Under the hood of a Doppelgänger
September 27, 2022 ONLINE DISINFORMATION is one of the defining issues of our time and the influence of fake news has become an acute threat to our society. Disinformation undermines true journalism and steers the public opinion in highly charged topics such as immigration, climate change, armed conflicts or refugee and health crises. Social media […]
The kompromat DeLorean – time traveling to hide evidence
July 11, 2022 Emilia Sercan is a Romanian investigative journalist specialized in plagiarism in doctoral dissertations. During the past seven years, she has exposed around 50 individual cases of plagiarism in doctoral dissertations of top Romanian politicians, including the current Prime Minister, ministers of the parliament, politicians, intelligence generals, army generals, police quaestors, professors, prosecutors, […]
Weaponizing Instagram against the Iranian #MeToo movement
June 16th, 2022 In April 2022, a number of Iranian feminist Instagram accounts become target of an unusual attack. The accounts were flooded by fake followers, and during the course of four weeks, around 1 million bots flooded 25 Instagram accounts connected to the Iranian #MeToo movement. The objective of the attack can be discussed, […]
How the thriving fraud industry within Facebook attacks independent media
May 5th, 2022 No eyebrows were raised in Quriums security operation center when the independent Philippine media outlet Bulatlat once again got DDoSed, as they are a frequent target of such digital attacks. However, when we noticed that the attack traffic came from valid users in Vietnam, we started to smell a rat… During more […]
The mysterious lawyers of Alexander Mashkevich
November 23, 2021 Qurium continues its investigations into the shady dealings of reputation management companies. Recently, Qurium has received two emails from “legal representatives” of Alexander Mashkevich, an Israeli-Kazakh billionaire, businessman and investor who has major holdings and close political relationships in Kazakhstan. Both representatives have requested Qurium to remove a certain article published by […]
CONFIRMED by CERT-PH: Philippine Army involved in DDoS attacks against independent media
September 23, 2021 In July 2021, Qurium Media Foundation reported on brief but frequent denial of service attacks against the Philippine alternative media outlets Bulatlat and Altermidya, as well as the human rights group Karapatan. The result of the initial digital forensics investigation was the finding of a link between the attack and the infrastructure […]
Who enabled the attacks against Karapatan?
August 25th, 2021 Last week, Qurium revealed that the Philippine human rights group Karapatan, a long term enemy of the Duterte regime, was suffering a lengthy DDoS attack. The attack, lasting for 25 consecutive days, involved multiple attack vectors and changed strategy and infrastructure several times during the course of the attack. The malicious traffic, […]
Human rights group under intensive DDoS attack
August 18, 2021 For the past three weeks, the Philippine human rights alliance Karapatan has suffered a heavy and sustained DDoS attack. The attack comes only a month after the waves of DDoS attacks targeting the alternative media outlets Bulatlat and Altermidya, which Qurium could link to infrastructure controlled by the Philippine government and army. […]
Phishing attack against Azerbaijani political and human rights activists
July 16, 2021 On July 7th, several prominent human rights and political activists in Azerbaijan received a targeted phishing mail impersonating Human Rights Watch. According to Qurium’s analysis, the mail included a link to a malware, with the capability of webcam and Desktop recording, execution of Windows commands and extraction and uploading of selected files […]
