{"id":226069,"date":"2026-03-21T09:17:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T13:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/21\/fbi-warns-russian-hackers-target-signal-whatsapp-in-mass-phishing-attacks\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T12:25:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T16:25:09","slug":"fbi-warns-russian-hackers-target-signal-whatsapp-in-mass-phishing-attacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/21\/fbi-warns-russian-hackers-target-signal-whatsapp-in-mass-phishing-attacks\/","title":{"rendered":"FBI Warns Russian Hackers Target Signal, WhatsApp in Mass Phishing Attacks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/03\/fbi-warns-russian-hackers-target-signal.html\">FBI Warns Russian Hackers Target Signal, WhatsApp in Mass Phishing Attacks<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/03\/fbi-warns-russian-hackers-target-signal.html\">https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/03\/fbi-warns-russian-hackers-target-signal.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-21 09:17:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"thehackernews.com\">thehackernews.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"p-author\">\ue804<span class=\"author\">Ravie Lakshmanan<\/span>\ue802<span class=\"author\">Mar 21, 2026<\/span><\/span><span class=\"p-tags\">Cyber Espionage \/ Threat Intelligence<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Threat actors affiliated with Russian Intelligence Services are conducting phishing campaigns to compromise commercial messaging applications (CMAs) like WhatsApp and Signal to seize control of accounts belonging to individuals with high intelligence value, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Friday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The campaign targets individuals of high intelligence value, including current and former U.S. government officials, military personnel, political figures, and journalists,&#8221; FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X. &#8220;Globally, this effort has resulted in unauthorized access to thousands of individual accounts. After gaining access, the actors can view messages and contact lists, send messages as the victim, and conduct additional phishing from a trusted identity.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>CISA and the FBI said the activity has resulted in the compromise of thousands of individual CMA accounts. It&#8217;s worth noting that the attacks are designed to break into the targeted accounts and do not exploit any security vulnerability or weakness to crack the platforms&#8217; encryption protections.<\/p>\n<p>While the agencies did not attribute the activity to a specific threat actor, prior reports from Microsoft and Google Threat Intelligence Group have linked such campaigns to multiple Russia-aligned threat clusters tracked as Star Blizzard, UNC5792 (aka UAC-0195), and UNC4221 (aka UAC-0185).<\/p>\n<p>In a similar alert, the Cyber Crisis Coordination Center (C4), part of the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI), warned of a surge in attack campaigns targeting instant messaging accounts associated with government officials, journalists, and business leaders.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;These attacks \u2013 when successful \u2013 can allow malicious actors to access conversation histories, or even take control of their victims&#8217; messaging accounts and send messages while impersonating them,&#8221; C4&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/03\/fbi-warns-russian-hackers-target-signal.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FBI Warns Russian Hackers Target Signal, WhatsApp in Mass Phishing Attacks https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/03\/fbi-warns-russian-hackers-target-signal.html Publish Date: 2026-03-21&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":226070,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEjiMsZnvgdoACYJn8WjDy_Lpvpy1iqvGpj-vb4hYfYTLujLp_5dm8WZKjl64LYwY4-MON0-1k8-F2K3KDu0QG7isYjhaMvre0E0vrqJCSP49r2j374JPbV6WvkTG8lwqwrxquX-3xrReaA3G-NQGvskSnlOtM1XRj1J3MdPuCK9lXC6vf8ZkrCizN6ohcLC\/s1600\/signal-whatsapp.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[24,31,25,34,27],"class_list":["post-226069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-cybersecurity","tag-exploit","tag-phishing","tag-threat-actor","tag-vulnerability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226069"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226069"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226071,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226069\/revisions\/226071"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}