'I can't be that careless,' says an Australian Uyghur activist.

A Uyghur activist in Australia who has been the target of cyber-attacks by hacker groups in China says the Australian government needs to do more to educate the Uyghur community in Australia to protect themselves online.

Facebook’s head of cyber-espionage investigations, Mike Dvilyanksi, and head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, reported in March that a China-based hacking group known as Earth Empusa or Evil Eye had been targeting fewer than 500 activists, journalists and dissidents, predominantly Uyghurs from Xinjiang in China living in Turkey, Kazakhstan, the US, Syria, Australia and Canada.

The group used fake accounts on Facebook to appear to be journalists, students, human rights advocates or members of the Uyghur community to trick the targets into clicking onto malicious links that would install spyware on their devices. Often the links would look like Uyghur or Turkish news sites.

Nurgul Sawut, a Uyghur community leader based in Canberra, was last month one of more than 10,000 people named on a Chinese blacklist of “suspected terrorists” due to her activism, reported by the ABC. She told Guardian Australia she had been targeted since 2019 on Facebook, and the attacks took a number of forms.

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