Hackers posed as McAfee staff to trick users into installing malware

According to a Google blog post, Chinese government-backed hackers pretended to be staff from cybersecurity provider McAfee and tricked users into installing malware on their devices.

Google said that these hackers would prompt users to install a legitimate version of the McAfee software from GitHub and on the side the malware was surreptitiously installed into the system.

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) that works on preventing cyber attacks identified the activity and instantly sent out a prominent warning. Google also said that the findings were shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

This particular threat comes just ahead of the US elections and threats like these have gradually been increasing over the months. Google sent out 10,316 warnings about government-backed attacks over July to September, the blog stated.