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A China-based advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Mustang Panda has been linked to an ongoing cyber espionage campaign using a previously undocumented variant of the PlugX remote access trojan on infected machines. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET dubbed the new version Hodur, owing to its resemblance to another PlugX (aka Korplug) variant called THOR that […]
A previously undocumented espionage tool has been deployed against selected governments and other critical infrastructure targets as part of a long-running espionage campaign orchestrated by China-linked threat actors since at least 2013. Broadcom’s Symantec Threat Hunter team characterized the backdoor, named Daxin, as a technologically advanced malware, allowing the attackers to carry out a variety […]
An advanced persistent threat (APT) group operating with objectives aligned with the Chinese government has been linked to an organized supply chain attack on Taiwan’s financial sector. The attacks are said to have first commenced at the end of November 2021, with the intrusions attributed to a threat actor tracked as APT10, also known as […]
Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the inner workings of ShadowPad, a sophisticated and modular backdoor that has been adopted by a growing number of Chinese threat groups in recent years, while also linking it to the country’s civilian and military intelligence agencies. “ShadowPad is decrypted in memory using a custom decryption algorithm,” researchers from Secureworks said […]
A previously undocumented firmware implant deployed to maintain stealthy persistence as part of a targeted espionage campaign has been linked to the Chinese-speaking Winnti advanced persistent threat group (APT41). Kaspersky, which codenamed the rootkit MoonBounce, characterized the malware as the “most advanced UEFI firmware implant discovered in the wild to date,” adding “the purpose of […]
A highly sophisticated adversary named LightBasin has been identified as behind a string of attacks targeting the telecom sector with the goal of collecting “highly specific information” from mobile communication infrastructure, such as subscriber information and call metadata. “The nature of the data targeted by the actor aligns with information likely to be of significant […]
Chinese cyber espionage group APT41 has been linked to seemingly disparate malware campaigns, according to fresh research that has mapped together additional parts of the group’s network infrastructure to hit upon a state-sponsored campaign that takes advantage of COVID-themed phishing lures to target victims in India. “The image we uncovered was that of a state-sponsored […]
A formerly unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor has been linked to a long-standing evasive operation aimed at South East Asian targets as far back as July 2020 to deploy a kernel-mode rootkit on compromised Windows systems. Attacks mounted by the hacking group, dubbed GhostEmperor by Kaspersky, are also said to have used a “sophisticated multi-stage malware […]
A previously undocumented backdoor that was recently found targeting an unnamed computer retail company based in the U.S. has been linked to a longstanding Chinese espionage operation dubbed Grayfly. In late August, Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET disclosed details of an implant called SideWalk, which is designed to load arbitrary plugins sent from an attacker-controlled server, […]
ShadowPad, an infamous Windows backdoor that allows attackers to download further malicious modules or steal data, has been put to use by five different Chinese threat clusters since 2017. “The adoption of ShadowPad significantly reduces the costs of development and maintenance for threat actors,” SentinelOne researchers Yi-Jhen Hsieh and Joey Chen said in a detailed […]
A Chinese cyber espionage group has been linked to a string of intrusion activities targeting Israeli government institutions, IT providers, and telecommunications companies at least since 2019, with the hackers masquerading themselves as Iranian actors to mislead forensic analysis. FireEye’s Mandiant threat intelligence arm attributed the campaign to an operator it tracks as “UNC215”, a […]
Three distinct clusters of malicious activities operating on behalf of Chinese state interests have staged a series of attacks to target networks belonging to at least five major telecommunications companies located in Southeast Asian countries since 2017. “The goal of the attackers behind these intrusions was to gain and maintain continuous access to telecommunication providers […]
The U.S. government and its key allies, including the European Union, the U.K., and NATO, formally attributed the massive cyberattack against Microsoft Exchange email servers to state-sponsored hacking crews working affiliated with the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). In a statement issued by the White House on Monday, the administration said, […]
A sweeping and “highly active campaign” that originally set its sights on Myanmar has broadened its focus to strike a number of targets located in the Philippines, according to new research. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which first spotted the infections in October 2020, attributed them to a threat actor it tracks as “LuminousMoth,” which it […]
A string of cyber espionage campaigns dating all the way back to 2014 and likely focused on gathering defense information from neighbouring countries have been linked to a Chinese military-intelligence apparatus. In a wide-ranging report published by Massachusetts-headquartered Recorded Future this week, the cybersecurity firm’s Insikt Group said it identified ties between a group it […]
An ongoing cyber-espionage operation with suspected ties to China has been found targeting a Southeast Asian government to deploy spyware on Windows systems while staying under the radar for more than three years. “In this campaign, the attackers utilized the set of Microsoft Office exploits and loaders with anti-analysis and anti-debugging techniques to install a […]
Cybersecurity researchers from FireEye unmasked additional tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by Chinese threat actors who were recently found abusing Pulse Secure VPN devices to drop malicious web shells and exfiltrate sensitive information from enterprise networks. FireEye’s Mandiant threat intelligence team, which is tracking the cyber espionage activity under two activity clusters UNC2630 and […]
A threat actor believed to be working on behalf of Chinese state-sponsored interests was recently observed targeting a Russia-based defense contractor involved in designing nuclear submarines for the naval arm of the Russian Armed Forces. The phishing attack, which singled out a general director working at the Rubin Design Bureau, leveraged the infamous “Royal Road” […]
Phishing is still one of the widely used strategies by cybercriminals and espionage groups to gain an initial foothold on the targeted systems. Though hacking someone with phishing attacks was easy a decade ago, the evolution of threat detection technologies and cyber awareness among people has slowed down the success of phishing and social engineering […]
Researchers discovered a new campaign with Zegost info stealer malware that believed to be originated from Chinese based threat actors who is targeting government networks in China. Zegost uncovered back to 2011 since then attackers updated with various new functionalities and added new persistence capabilities, exploits to maintain the access. Researchers believe that the malware only […]
Researchers discovered a previously unseen malware called Okrum that distributed from APT15 threat group via a hidden PNG file with steganography technique to evade detection. APT15 threat group also known as Ke3chang has a long history of its malicious activities since 2010, and it was initially reported in 2013 during their campaign activity attack organization in […]