Chinese Hackers | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A suspected Chinese state-sponsored actor breached a digital certificate authority as well as government and defense agencies located in different countries in Asia as part of an ongoing campaign since at least March 2022. Symantec, by Broadcom Software, linked the attacks to an adversarial group it tracks under the name  Billbug , citing the use of tools previously attributed to this actor. The activity appears to be driven by espionage and data-theft, although no data is said to have been stolen to date. Billbug , also called Bronze Elgin, Lotus Blossom, Lotus Panda,  Spring Dragon , and  Thrip , is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that is believed to operate on behalf of Chinese interests. Primary targets include government and military organizations in South East Asia. Attacks mounted by the adversary in 2019 involved the use of backdoors like  Hannotog and Sagerunex , with the intrusions observed in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

Entities located in East and Southeast Asia as well as Ukraine have been targeted at least since 2020 by a previously undocumented subgroup of  APT41 , a prolific Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT). Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, which  christened  the espionage crew  Earth Longzhi , said the actor's long-running campaign can be split into two based on the toolset deployed to attack its victims. The first wave from May 2020 to February 2021 is said to have targeted government, infrastructure, and healthcare industries in Taiwan and the banking sector in China, whereas the succeeding set of intrusions from August 2021 to June 2022 infiltrated high-profile victims in Ukraine and several countries in Asia. This included defense, aviation, insurance, and urban development industries in Taiwan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ukraine. The victimology patterns and the targeted sectors overlap with attacks mounted by a distinct subordinate group of  APT41

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The Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as Stone Panda has been observed employing a new stealthy infection chain in its attacks aimed at Japanese entities. Targets include media, diplomatic, governmental and public sector organizations, and think-tanks in Japan, according to  twin   reports  published by Kaspersky. Stone Panda , also called  APT10 , Bronze Riverside, Cicada, and Potassium, is a cyber  espionage group  known for its intrusions against organizations identified as strategically significant to China. The threat actor is believed to have been active since at least 2009. The group has also been linked to attacks using malware families like SigLoader, SodaMaster , and a web shell called Jackpot against multiple Japanese domestic organizations since April 2021, per cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, which is tracking the group under the name Earth Tengshe . The latest set of attacks, observed between March and June 2022, involve the use of a bogus Microsoft Word fi

An advanced persistent threat (APT) group of Chinese origin codenamed  DiceyF  has been linked to a string of attacks aimed at online casinos in Southeast Asia for years. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said the activity aligns with another set of intrusions attributed to  Earth Berberoka  (aka  GamblingPuppet ) and  DRBControl , citing tactical and targeting similarities as well as the abuse of secure messaging clients. "Possibly we have a mix of espionage and [intellectual property] theft, but the true motivations remain a mystery," researchers Kurt Baumgartner and Georgy Kucherin  said  in a technical write-up published this week. The starting point of the investigation was in November 2021 when Kaspersky said it detected multiple  PlugX loaders  and other payloads that were deployed via an employee monitoring service and a security package deployment service. The initial infection method – the distribution of the framework through security solution packages

The China-aligned espionage-focused actor dubbed Winnti has set its sights on government organizations in Hong Kong as part of an ongoing campaign dubbed  Operation CuckooBees . Active since at least 2007,  Winnti  (aka APT41, Barium, Bronze Atlas, and Wicked Panda) is the name designated to a prolific cyber threat group that carries out Chinese state-sponsored espionage activity, predominantly aimed at stealing technology secrets from organizations in developed economies. The threat actor's campaigns have targeted healthcare, telecoms, high-tech, media, agriculture, and education sectors, with infection chains primarily relying on spear-phishing emails with attachments to initially break into the victims' networks. Earlier this May, Cybereason  disclosed  long-running attacks orchestrated by the group since 2019 to siphon intellectual property from technology and manufacturing companies mainly located in East Asia, Western Europe, and North America. The intrusions, clubb

Tata Power Company Limited, India's largest integrated power company, on Friday confirmed it was targeted by a cyber attack. The intrusion on IT infrastructure impacted "some of its IT systems," the company  said  in a filing with the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India. It further said it has taken steps to retrieve and restore the affected machines, adding it put in place security guardrails for customer-facing portals to prevent unauthorized access. The Mumbai-based electric utility company, part of the Tata Group conglomerate, did not disclose any further details about the nature of the attack, or when it took place. That said, cybersecurity firm Recorded Future in April  disclosed  attacks mounted by China-linked adversaries targeting Indian power grid organizations. The network intrusions were said to have been aimed at "at least seven Indian State Load Despatch Centres (SLDCs) responsible for carrying out real-time operations for grid control and ele

Telecommunications and IT service providers in the Middle East and Asia are being targeted by a previously undocumented Chinese-speaking threat group dubbed WIP19 . The espionage-related attacks are characterized by the use of a stolen digital certificate issued by a Korean company called DEEPSoft to sign malicious artifacts deployed during the infection chain to evade detection. "Almost all operations performed by the threat actor were completed in a 'hands-on keyboard' fashion, during an interactive session with compromised machines," SentinelOne researchers Joey Chen and Amitai Ben Shushan Ehrlich  said  in a report this week. "This meant the attacker gave up on a stable [command-and-control] channel in exchange for stealth." WIP, short for work-in-progress, is the moniker assigned by SentinelOne to emerging or hitherto unattributed activity clusters,  similar  to the UNC####, DEV-####, and TAG-## designations given by Mandiant, Microsoft, and Reco

A China-aligned advanced persistent threat actor known as TA413 weaponized recently disclosed flaws in Sophos Firewall and Microsoft Office to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor called LOWZERO as part of an espionage campaign aimed at Tibetan entities. Targets primarily consisted of organizations associated with the Tibetan community, including enterprises associated with the Tibetan government-in-exile. The intrusions involved the exploitation of  CVE-2022-1040  and  CVE-2022-30190  (aka "Follina"), two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Sophos Firewall and Microsoft Office, respectively. "This willingness to rapidly incorporate new techniques and methods of initial access contrasts with the group's continued use of well known and reported capabilities, such as the Royal Road RTF weaponizer, and often lax infrastructure procurement tendencies," Recorded Future  said  in a new technical analysis. TA413, also known as LuckyCat, has been linked to rel

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has added Pacific Network Corp, along with its subsidiary ComNet (USA) LLC, and China Unicom (Americas) Operations Limited, to the list of communications equipment and services that have been deemed a threat to national security. The agency  said  the companies are subject to the Chinese government's exploitation, influence, and control, and could be forced to comply with requests for intercepting and misrouting communications, without the ability to challenge such requests. The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau further noted that equipment and services from ComNet and China Unicom could present an opportunity for the Chinese government to carry out espionage operations and gather intelligence against the U.S. Alternatively, they could also provide the Chinese government with a strategic capability to "target, collect, alter, block, and reroute network traffic." China Unicom also earned a place on the list fo

China has accused the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of conducting a string of cyberattacks aimed at aeronautical and military research-oriented Northwestern Polytechnical University in the city of Xi'an in June 2022. The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre (NCVERC) disclosed its findings last week, and accused the Office of Tailored Access Operations ( TAO ), a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), of orchestrating thousands of attacks against the entities located within the country. "The U.S. NSA's TAO has carried out tens of thousands of malicious cyber attacks on China's domestic network targets, controlled tens of thousands of network devices (network servers, Internet terminals, network switches, telephone exchanges, routers, firewalls, etc.), and stole more than 140GB of high-value data," the NCVERC  said . According to the U.S. Department of Justice ( DoJ ), Northwestern Polytechnical Unive

A months-long cyber espionage campaign undertaken by a Chinese nation-state group targeted several entities with reconnaissance malware so as to glean information about its victims and meet its strategic goals. "The targets of this recent campaign spanned Australia, Malaysia, and Europe, as well as entities that operate in the South China Sea," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a published in partnership with PwC. Targets encompass local and federal Australian Governmental agencies, Australian news media companies, and global heavy industry manufacturers which conduct maintenance of fleets of wind turbines in the South China Sea. Proofpoint and PwC attributed the intrusions with moderate confidence to a threat actor tracked by the two companies under the names TA423 and Red Ladon respectively, which is also known as APT40 and Leviathan. APT40 is the name designated to a China-based, espionage-motivated threat actor that's known to be active since 2013 and

The Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) actor tracked as Winnti has targeted at least 13 organizations geographically spanning across the U.S, Taiwan, India, Vietnam, and China against the backdrop of four different campaigns in 2021. "The targeted industries included the public sector, manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, hospitality, education, as well as the media and aviation," cybersecurity firm Group-IB  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. This also included the attack on Air India that came to light in June 2021 as part of a campaign codenamed  ColunmTK . The other three campaigns have been assigned the monikers DelayLinkTK, Mute-Pond, and Gentle-Voice based on the domain names used in the attacks. APT41, also known as Barium, Bronze Atlas, Double Dragon, Wicked Panda, or Winnti, is a  prolific   Chinese   cyber threat group  that's known to carry out state-sponsored espionage activity in parallel with financially motivated operations at least

A Chinese state-sponsored threat activity group named RedAlpha has been attributed to a multi-year mass credential theft campaign aimed at global humanitarian, think tank, and government organizations. "In this activity, RedAlpha very likely sought to gain access to email accounts and other online communications of targeted individuals and organizations," Recorded Future  disclosed  in a new report.  A lesser-known threat actor, RedAlpha was first  documented  by Citizen Lab in January 2018 and has a history of conducting cyber espionage and surveillance operations directed against the Tibetan community, some in India, to facilitate intelligence collection through the deployment of the NjRAT backdoor . "The campaigns [...] combine light reconnaissance, selective targeting, and diverse malicious tooling," Recorded Future  noted  at the time. Since then, malicious activities undertaken by the group have involved weaponizing as many as 350 domains that spoof leg

Over a dozen military-industrial complex enterprises and public institutions in Afghanistan and Europe have come under a wave of targeted attacks since January 2022 to steal confidential data by simultaneously making use of six different backdoors. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  attributed  the attacks "with a high degree of confidence" to a China-linked threat actor tracked by  Proofpoint  as  TA428 , citing overlaps in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).  TA428, also known by the names Bronze Dudley, Temp.Hex, and Vicious Panda, has a  history  of striking entities in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Mongolia. It's believed to share connections with another hacking group called Mustang Panda (aka Bronze President). Targets of the latest cyber espionage campaign included industrial plants, design bureaus and research institutes, government agencies, ministries and departments in several East European countries and Afghanistan. Attack chains entail penet

Researchers have disclosed a new offensive framework referred to as Manjusaka that they call is a "Chinese sibling of Sliver and Cobalt Strike." "A fully functional version of the command-and-control (C2), written in Golang with a User Interface in Simplified Chinese, is freely available and can generate new implants with custom configurations with ease, increasing the likelihood of wider adoption of this framework by malicious actors," Cisco Talos  said  in a new report. Sliver  and  Cobalt Strike  are legitimate adversary emulation frameworks that have been repurposed by threat actors to carry out post-exploitation activities such as network reconnaissance, lateral movement, and facilitating the deployment of follow-on payloads. Written in Rust, Manjusaka -- meaning "cow flower" -- is advertised as an equivalent to the Cobalt Strike framework with capabilities to target both Windows and Linux operating systems. Its developer is believed to be located

Nation-state hacking groups aligned with China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey have been targeting journalists to conduct espionage and spread malware as part of a series of campaigns since early 2021. "Most commonly, phishing attacks targeting journalists are used for espionage or to gain key insights into the inner workings of another government, company, or other area of state-designated import," Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The ultimate goal of the "sustained" intrusions, the enterprise security firm said, is to gain a competitive intelligence edge or spread disinformation and propaganda. Proofpoint said it identified two Chinese hacking groups, TA412 (aka  Zirconium  or Judgment Panda) and  TA459 , targeting media personnel with malicious emails containing web beacons and weaponized documents respectively that were used to amass information about the recipients' network environments and drop  Chinoxy  malware. In a simila

Popular video-sharing platform TikTok on Tuesday agreed to pause a controversial privacy policy update that could have allowed it to serve targeted ads based on users' activity on the social video platform without their permission to do so. The reversal, reported by  TechCrunch , comes a day after the Italian data protection authority — the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali — warned the company against the change, citing violations of data protection laws. "The personal data stored in users' devices may not be used to profile those users and send personalized ads without their explicit consent," the Garante  said . The formal warning was in response to a privacy policy revision that noted the service had historically asked users' "consent" to their on-TikTok activity and off-TikTok activity to serve personalized ads and that, therefore, it intends to stop asking users for their permission to profile their behavior and process personal dat

A pro-China  influence campaign  singled out rare earth mining companies in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. with negative messaging in an unsuccessful attempt to manipulate public discourse to China's benefit. Targeted firms included Australia's Lynas Rare Earths Ltd, Canada's Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp, and the American company USA Rare Earth, threat intelligence firm Mandiant said in a report last week, calling the digital campaign  Dragonbridge . "It targeted an industry of strategic significance to the PRC, including specifically three commercial entities challenging the  PRC's global market dominance  in that industry," Mandiant  noted . The goal, the company noted, was to instigate environmental protests against the companies and propagate counter-narratives in response to potential or planned rare earths production activities involving the targets. This comprised a network of thousands of inauthentic accounts across numerous social medi