Chinese Hacker | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Government and telecom entities have been subjected to a new wave of attacks by a China-linked threat actor tracked as  Budworm  using an updated malware toolset. The intrusions, targeting a Middle Eastern telecommunications organization and an Asian government, took place in August 2023, with the adversary deploying an improved version of its SysUpdate toolkit, the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Budworm , also referred to by the names APT27, Bronze Union, Emissary Panda, Iron Tiger, Lucky Mouse, and Red Phoenix, is known to be active since at least 2013, targeting a wide range of industry verticals in pursuit of its intelligence gathering goals.  The nation-state group leverages various tools such as China Chopper web shell, Gh0st RAT, HyperBro, PlugX, SysUpdate, and ZXShell to exfiltrate high-value information and maintain access to sensitive systems over a long period of time. A previous report from SecureWorks in

The China-linked threat actor known as  Earth Lusca  has been observed targeting government entities using a never-before-seen Linux backdoor called SprySOCKS. Earth Lusca was  first documented  by Trend Micro in January 2022, detailing the adversary's attacks against public and private sector entities across Asia, Australia, Europe, North America. Active since 2021, the group has relied on spear-phishing and watering hole attacks to pull off its cyber espionage schemes. Some activities of the group overlap with another threat cluster tracked by Recorded Future under the name  RedHotel . The latest findings from the cybersecurity firm show that Earth Lusca continues to be an active group, even expanding its operations to target organizations across the world during the first half of 2023. Primary targets include government departments that are involved in foreign affairs, technology, and telecommunications. The attacks are concentrated in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

A threat actor called  Redfly  has been linked to a compromise of a national grid located in an unnamed Asian country for as long as six months earlier this year using a known malware referred to as  ShadowPad . "The attackers managed to steal credentials and compromise multiple computers on the organization's network," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attack is the latest in a series of espionage intrusions against [critical national infrastructure] targets." ShadowPad, also known as PoisonPlug, is a follow-up to the PlugX remote access trojan and is a modular implant capable of loading additional plugins dynamically from a remote server as required to harvest sensitive data from breached networks. It has been  widely used  by a growing list of  China-nexus   nation-state groups  since at least 2019 in attacks aimed at organizations in various industry verticals. "ShadowPad is dec

Telecommunication services providers in Africa are the target of a new campaign orchestrated by a China-linked threat actor at least since November 2022. The intrusions have been pinned on a hacking crew tracked by Symantec as  Daggerfly , and which is also monitored by the broader cybersecurity community as Bronze Highland and Evasive Panda. The campaign makes use of "previously unseen plugins from the MgBot malware framework," the cybersecurity company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attackers were also seen using a  PlugX loader  and abusing the legitimate AnyDesk remote desktop software." Daggerfly's use of the  MgBot loader  (aka BLame or MgmBot) was  spotlighted  by Malwarebytes in July 2020 as part of phishing attacks aimed at Indian government personnel and individuals in Hong Kong. According to a profile published by Secureworks, the threat actor uses spear-phishing as an initial infection vector to drop MgBot as well as othe

Microsoft has shared technical details about a now-fixed, actively exploited critical security vulnerability affecting SolarWinds Serv-U managed file transfer service that it has attributed with "high confidence" to a threat actor operating out of China. In mid-July, the Texas-based company  remedied  a remote code execution flaw ( CVE-2021-35211 ) that was rooted in Serv-U's implementation of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, which could be abused by attackers to run arbitrary code on the infected system, including the ability to install malicious programs and view, change, or delete sensitive data. "The Serv-U SSH server is subject to a pre-auth remote code execution vulnerability that can be easily and reliably exploited in the default configuration," Microsoft Offensive Research and Security Engineering team said in a  detailed write-up  describing the exploit. "An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by connecting to the open SSH port and sendin

An amalgam of multiple state-sponsored threat groups from China may have been behind a string of targeted attacks against Russian federal executive authorities in 2020. The latest research, published by Singapore-headquartered company Group-IB, delves into a piece of computer virus called " Webdav-O " that was detected in the intrusions, with the cybersecurity firm observing similarities between the tool and that of popular Trojan called " BlueTraveller ," that's known to be connected to a Chinese threat group called TaskMasters and deployed in malicious activities with the aim of espionage and plundering confidential documents. "Chinese APTs are one of the most numerous and aggressive hacker communities," researchers Anastasia Tikhonova and Dmitry Kupin  said . "Hackers mostly target state agencies, industrial facilities, military contractors, and research institutes. The main objective is espionage: attackers gain access to confidential data