Chinese Hackers | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A suspected Chinese-speaking threat actor has been attributed to a malicious campaign that targets the Uzbekistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and South Korean users with a remote access trojan called  SugarGh0st RAT . The activity, which commenced no later than August 2023, leverages two different infection sequences to deliver the malware, which is a customized variant of  Gh0st RAT  (aka Farfli). It comes with features to "facilitate the remote administration tasks as directed by the C2 and modified communication protocol based on the similarity of the command structure and the strings used in the code," Cisco Talos researchers Ashley Shen and Chetan Raghuprasad  said . The attacks commence with a phishing email bearing decoy documents, opening which activates a multi-stage process that leads to the deployment of SugarGh0st RAT. The decoy documents are incorporated within a heavily obfuscated JavaScript dropper that's contained within a Windows Shortcut file embed

An ad fraud botnet dubbed  PEACHPIT  leveraged an army of hundreds of thousands of Android and iOS devices to generate illicit profits for the threat actors behind the scheme. The botnet is part of a larger China-based operation codenamed  BADBOX , which also entails selling off-brand mobile and connected TV (CTV) devices on popular online retailers and resale sites that are backdoored with an  Android malware strain  called  Triada . "The PEACHPIT botnet's conglomerate of associated apps were found in 227 countries and territories, with an estimated peak of 121,000 devices a day on Android and 159,000 devices a day on iOS," HUMAN  said . The infections are said to have been realized through a collection of 39 apps that were installed more than 15 million times. Devices fitted with the BADBOX malware allowed the operators to steal sensitive data, create residential proxy exit peers, and commit ad fraud through the bogus apps. It's currently not clear how the And

If forecasters are right, over the course of today, consumers will spend  $13.7 billion . Just about every click, sale, and engagement will be captured by a CRM platform. Inventory applications will trigger automated re-orders; communication tools will send automated email and text messages confirming sales and sharing shipping information.  SaaS applications supporting retail efforts will host nearly all of this behind-the-scenes activity. While retailers are rightfully focused on sales during this time of year, they need to ensure that the SaaS apps supporting their business operations are secure. No one wants a repeat of one of the biggest retail cyber-snafus in history, like when one U.S.-based national retailer had 40 million credit card records stolen.  The attack surface is vast and retailers must remain vigilant in protecting their entire SaaS app stack. For example, many often use multiple instances of the same application. They may use a different Salesforce tenant for eve

A "multi-year" Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage campaign has been observed targeting South Korean academic, political, and government organizations. Recorded Future's Insikt Group, which is  tracking  the activity under the moniker TAG-74, said the adversary has been linked to "Chinese military intelligence and poses a significant threat to academic, aerospace and defense, government, military, and political entities in South Korea, Japan, and Russia." The cybersecurity firm characterized the targeting of South Korean academic institutions as in alignment with China's broader efforts to conduct intellectual property theft and expand its influence, not to mention motivated by the country's strategic relations with the U.S. Social engineering attacks mounted by the adversary make use of Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file lures to drop a custom variant of an open-source Visual Basic Script backdoor called  ReVBShell , which subsequently ser

China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) has accused the U.S. of breaking into Huawei's servers, stealing critical data, and implanting backdoors since 2009, amid mounting geopolitical tensions between the two countries. In a  message  posted on WeChat, the government authority said U.S. intelligence agencies have "done everything possible" to conduct surveillance, secret theft, and intrusions on many countries around the world, including China, using a "powerful cyber attack arsenal." Specifics about the alleged hacks were not shared. It explicitly singled out the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) Computer Network Operations (formerly the Office of Tailored Access Operations or TAO) as having "repeatedly carried out systematic and platform-based attacks" against the country to plunder its "important data resources." The post went on to claim that the cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit hacked Huawei's servers in 200

Microsoft on Wednesday revealed that a China-based threat actor known as  Storm-0558  acquired the inactive consumer signing key to forge tokens and access Outlook by compromising an engineer's corporate account. This enabled the adversary to access a debugging environment that contained information pertaining to a crash of the consumer signing system and steal the key. The system crash took place in April 2021. "A consumer signing system crash in April of 2021 resulted in a snapshot of the crashed process ('crash dump')," the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC)  said  in a post-mortem report. "The crash dumps, which redact sensitive information, should not include the signing key. In this case, a race condition allowed the key to be present in the crash dump. The key material's presence in the crash dump was not detected by our systems." The Windows maker said the crash dump was moved to a debugging environment on the internet-connected corporate network, from where Storm-

A nation-state activity group originating from China has been linked to cyber attacks on dozens of organizations in Taiwan as part of a suspected espionage campaign. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence team is tracking the activity under the name  Flax Typhoon , which is also known as Ethereal Panda. "Flax Typhoon gains and maintains long-term access to Taiwanese organizations' networks with minimal use of malware, relying on tools built into the operating system, along with some normally benign software to quietly remain in these networks," the company  said . It further said it hasn't observed the group weaponize the access to conduct data-collection and exfiltration. A majority of the targets include government agencies, educational institutions, critical manufacturing, and information technology organizations in Taiwan. A smaller number of victims have also been detected in Southeast Asia, North America, and Africa. The group is suspected to have been active si

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning that Barracuda Networks Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances patched against a recently disclosed critical flaw continue to be at risk of potential compromise from suspected Chinese hacking groups. It also  deemed  the fixes as "ineffective" and that it "continues to observe active intrusions and considers all affected Barracuda ESG appliances to be compromised and vulnerable to this exploit." Tracked as  CVE-2023-2868  (CVSS score: 9.8), the zero-day bug is said to have been weaponized as early as October 2022, more than seven months before the security hole was plugged. Google-owned Mandiant is tracking the China-nexus activity cluster under the name  UNC4841 . The remote command injection vulnerability, impacting versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006, allows for unauthorized execution of system commands with administrator privileges on the ESG product. In the attacks observed so far, a successful b

The Chinese threat actor known as APT31 (aka Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, or Violet Typhoon) has been linked to a set of advanced backdoors that are capable of exfiltrating harvested sensitive information to Dropbox. The malware is part of a broader collection of  more than 15 implants  that have been put to use by the adversary in attacks targeting industrial organizations in Eastern Europe in 2022. "The attackers aimed to establish a permanent channel for data exfiltration, including data stored on air-gapped systems," Kaspersky  said  in an analysis spotlighting APT31's previously undocumented tradecraft. The intrusions employ a three-stage malware stack, each focused on disparate aspects of the attack chain: setting up persistence, gathering sensitive data, and transmitting the information to a remote server under the threat actor's control. Some variants of the second-stage backdoors also come with features designed to look up file names in the Microso

A widely used Chinese language input app for Windows and Android has been found vulnerable to serious security flaws that could allow a malicious interloper to decipher the text typed by users. The findings from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which carried out an analysis of the encryption mechanism used in Tencent's Sogou Input Method , an app that has over 455 million monthly active users across Windows, Android, and iOS. The vulnerabilities are rooted in EncryptWall, the service's custom encryption system, allowing network eavesdroppers to extract the textual content and access sensitive data. "The Windows and Android versions of Sogou Input Method contain vulnerabilities in this encryption system, including a vulnerability to a CBC  padding oracle attack , which allow network eavesdroppers to recover the plaintext of encrypted network transmissions, revealing sensitive information including what users have typed," the researchers  said . CBC, s

Hackers associated with China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) have been linked to attacks in 17 different countries in Asia, Europe, and North America from 2021 to 2023. Cybersecurity firm Recorded Future attributed the intrusion set to a nation-state group it tracks under the name  RedHotel  (previously Threat Activity Group-22 or TAG-22), which overlaps with a cluster of activity broadly monitored as  Aquatic Panda ,  Bronze University , Charcoal Typhoon,  Earth Lusca , and  Red Scylla  (or Red Dev 10). Active since 2019, some of the prominent sectors targeted by the prolific actor encompass academia, aerospace, government, media, telecommunications, and research. A majority of the victims during the period were government organizations. "RedHotel has a dual mission of intelligence gathering and economic espionage," the cybersecurity company  said , calling out its persistence, operational intensity, and global reach. "It targets both government entities for

A nation-state actor with links to China is suspected of being behind a series of attacks against industrial organizations in Eastern Europe that took place last year to siphon data stored on air-gapped systems. Cybersecurity company Kaspersky attributed the intrusions with medium to high confidence to a hacking crew called  APT31 , which is also tracked under the monikers Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium), citing commonalities in the tactics observed. The attacks entailed the use of more than 15 distinct implants and their variants, broken down into three broad categories based on their ability to establish persistent remote access, gather sensitive information, and transmit the collected data to actor-controlled infrastructure. "One of the implant types appeared to be a sophisticated modular malware, aimed at profiling removable drives and contaminating them with a worm to exfiltrate data from isolated, or air-gapped, networks of indus

The recent attack against  Microsoft's email infrastructure  by a Chinese nation-state actor referred to as Storm-0558 is said to have a broader scope than previously thought. According to cloud security company Wiz, the inactive Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key used to forge Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or AAD) tokens to gain illicit access to Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Outlook.com could also have allowed the adversary to forge access tokens for various types of Azure AD applications. This  includes  every application that supports personal account authentication, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams; customers applications that support the "Login with Microsoft functionality," and multi-tenant applications in certain conditions. "Everything in the world of Microsoft leverages Azure Active Directory auth tokens for access," Ami Luttwak, chief technology officer and co-founder of Wiz, said in a statement. "An attacker with an AAD si

The prolific China-linked nation-state actor known as APT41 has been linked to two previously undocumented strains of Android spyware called WyrmSpy and DragonEgg. "Known for its exploitation of web-facing applications and infiltration of traditional endpoint devices, an established threat actor like APT 41 including mobile in its arsenal of malware shows how mobile endpoints are high-value targets with coveted corporate and personal data," Lookout  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. APT41, also tracked under the names Axiom, Blackfly, Brass Typhoon (formerly Barium), Bronze Atlas, HOODOO, Wicked Panda, and Winnti, is known to be operational since at least 2007, targeting a wide range of industries to conduct intellectual property theft. Recent attacks mounted by the adversarial collective have  leveraged  an open-source red teaming tool known as Google Command and Control (GC2) as part of attacks aimed at media and job platforms in Taiwan and Italy. The init

An unnamed Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agency in the U.S. detected anomalous email activity in mid-June 2023, leading to Microsoft's discovery of a new China-linked  espionage campaign  targeting two dozen organizations. The details come from a joint cybersecurity advisory released by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on July 12, 2023. "In June 2023, a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agency identified suspicious activity in their Microsoft 365 (M365) cloud environment," the authorities  said . "Microsoft determined that advanced persistent threat (APT) actors accessed and exfiltrated unclassified Exchange Online Outlook data." While the name of the government agency was not revealed,  CNN  and  the Washington Post  reported it was the U.S. State Department, citing people familiar with the matter. Also targeted were the Commerce Department as well as the email accou

Microsoft on Tuesday  revealed  that it repelled a cyber attack staged by a Chinese nation-state actor targeting two dozen organizations, some of which include government agencies, in a cyber espionage campaign designed to acquire confidential data. The attacks, which commenced on May 15, 2023, entailed access to email accounts affecting approximately 25 entities and a small number of related individual consumer accounts. The tech giant attributed the campaign to Storm-0558, describing it as a nation-state activity group based out of China that primarily singles out government agencies in Western Europe. "They focus on espionage, data theft, and credential access," Microsoft  said . "They are also known to use custom malware that Microsoft tracks as Cigril and Bling, for credential access." The breach is said to have been detected a month later on June 16, 2023, after an unidentified customer reported the anomalous email activity to the company. Microsoft sai

A Chinese nation-state group has been observed targeting Foreign Affairs ministries and embassies in Europe using  HTML smuggling techniques  to deliver the PlugX remote access trojan on compromised systems. Cybersecurity firm Check Point said the activity, dubbed  SmugX , has been ongoing since at least December 2022, adding it's part of a broader trend of Chinese adversaries shifting their focus to Europe. "The campaign uses new delivery methods to deploy (most notably – HTML Smuggling) a new variant of PlugX, an implant commonly associated with a wide variety of Chinese threat actors," Check Point  said . "Although the payload itself remains similar to the one found in older PlugX variants, its delivery methods result in low detection rates, which until recently helped the campaign fly under the radar." The exact identity of the threat actor behind the operation is a little hazy, although existing clues point in the direction of  Mustang Panda , which a

The Chinese cyber espionage actor known as  Camaro Dragon  has been observed leveraging a new strain of self-propagating malware that spreads through compromised USB drives. "While their primary focus has traditionally been Southeast Asian countries, this latest discovery reveals their global reach and highlights the alarming role USB drives play in spreading malware," Check Point said in new research shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company, which found evidence of USB malware infections in Myanmar, South Korea, Great Britain, India, and Russia, said the findings are the result of a cyber incident that it investigated at an unnamed European hospital in early 2023. The probe found that the entity was not directly targeted by the adversary but rather suffered a breach via an employee's USB drive, which became infected when it was plugged into a colleague's computer at a conference in Asia. "Consequently, upon returning to the healthcare institu

A Chinese-speaking phishing gang dubbed  PostalFurious  has been linked to a new SMS campaign that's targeting users in the U.A.E. by masquerading as postal services and toll operators, per Group-IB. The fraudulent scheme entails sending users bogus text messages asking them to pay a vehicle trip fee to avoid additional fines. The messages also contain a shortened URL to conceal the actual phishing link. Clicking on the link directs the unsuspecting recipients to a fake landing page that's designed to capture payment credentials and personal data. The campaign is estimated to be active as of April 15, 2023. "The URLs from the texts lead to fake branded payment pages that ask for personal details, such as name, address, and credit card information," Group-IB  said . "The phishing pages appropriate the official name and logo of the impersonated postal service provider." The exact scale of the attacks is currently unknown. What's known is that the tex