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Human rights activist Drew Pavlou has been the target of Chinese hackers who accessed his private email account and may have obtained the identity of vulnerable Uighurs with whom he has been in contact.
The breach was confirmed by cyber security experts who laid a trap for the hackers by planting false information in the account – a fake book contract said to be worth $350,000.
The exact figure soon found its way into a social media post by a pro-Beijing activist group run by two Australians.
One of the pair believes the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre is a hoax and the other, believed to be his daughter, is a pro-China activist with links to China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Mr Pavlou suspects information obtained from his hacked emails resulted in Chinese authorities detaining the mother of an Australia-based Uighur he had interviewed for a research project he was working on.
Shortly after the anti-China activist was initially hacked, she was tracked down and sent to a re-education facility in Xinjiang by Chinese authorities.
She had previously been the target of Chinese secret police after her son was identified as being at a high-profile protest held at the University of Queensland with Mr Pavlou in 2019.
The protest was a show of support for Hong Kong democracy and denounced human rights abuses committed by Beijing against Uighurs. Following subsequent protests, Mr Pavlou was suspended from the University of Queensland.
He has since been subject to multiple hit-pieces by Chinese Communist Party tabloid the Global Times and was the target of a Chinese foreign...