accused what it said was the cyber wing of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service , which is loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, of running rudimentary hacking operations that targeted Palestinian reporters, activists, and dissidents, as well as other groups in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Mike Dvilyanski, Facebook's head of cyber espionage investigations, told Reuters ahead of the report's publication that the campaign's methods were crude, but "we do see them as persistent." Attributing malicious activity online is notoriously tricky, but Dvilyanski said the world's largest social network "had multiple data points that linked this cluster of activity to the PSS and our confidence in this attribution is quite high."