Chinese Hackers | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Chinese international students in the U.K. have been targeted by persistent Chinese-speaking scammers for over a year as part of an activity dubbed  RedZei  (aka RedThief). "The RedZei fraudsters have chosen their targets carefully, researched them and realized it was a rich victim group that is ripe for exploitation," cybersecurity researcher Will Thomas (@BushidoToken)  said  in a write-up published last week. The most notable aspect about the operation is the steps taken by the threat actors to bypass steps taken by users to prevent scam calls, using a new pay-as-you-go U.K. phone number for each wave so as to render phone number-based blocking ineffective. Thomas, pointing out the meticulous tradecraft employed by the scammers, said the threat actor alternates between SIMs from several mobile carriers such as Three, O2, EE, Tesco Mobile, and Telia. Indications are that the lucrative RedZei campaign may have started as far back as August 2019, with a report from The

A malicious campaign targeting the Middle East is likely linked to  BackdoorDiplomacy , an advanced persistent threat (APT) group with ties to China. The espionage activity, directed against a telecom company in the region, is said to have commenced on August 19, 2021 through the successful exploitation of  ProxyShell flaws  in the Microsoft Exchange Server. Initial compromise leveraged binaries vulnerable to side-loading techniques, followed by using a mix of legitimate and bespoke tools to conduct reconnaissance, harvest data, move laterally across the environment, and evade detection. "File attributes of the malicious tools showed that the first tools deployed by the threat actors were the NPS proxy tool and IRAFAU backdoor," Bitdefender researchers Victor Vrabie and Adrian Schipor said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Starting in February 2022, the threat actors used another tool – [the] Quarian backdoor, along with many other scanners and proxy/tunnel

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A threat actor with a suspected China nexus has been linked to a set of espionage attacks in the Philippines that primarily relies on USB devices as an initial infection vector. Mandiant, which is part of Google Cloud, is tracking the cluster under its uncategorized moniker  UNC4191 . An analysis of the artifacts used in the intrusions indicates that the campaign dates as far back as September 2021. "UNC4191 operations have affected a range of public and private sector entities primarily in Southeast Asia and extending to the U.S., Europe, and APJ," researchers Ryan Tomcik, John Wolfram, Tommy Dacanay, and Geoff Ackerman  said . "However, even when targeted organizations were based in other locations, the specific systems targeted by UNC4191 were also found to be physically located in the Philippines." The reliance on infected USB drives to propagate the malware is unusual if  not new . The  Raspberry Robin  worm, which has  evolved  into an initial access ser

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) formally announced it will no longer authorize electronic equipment from Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision, and Dahua, deeming them an "unacceptable" national security threat. All these Chinese telecom and video surveillance companies were previously included in the  Covered List  as of March 12, 2021. "The FCC is committed to protecting our national security by ensuring that untrustworthy communications equipment is not authorized for use within our borders, and we are continuing that work here," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel  said  in a Friday order. "These new rules are an important part of our ongoing actions to protect the American people from national security threats involving telecommunications." Pursuant to the ban, Hytera, Hikvision, and Dahua are required to document the safeguards the firms are putting in place on the sale of their devices for government use and surveillance of critical i

A notorious advanced persistent threat actor known as  Mustang Panda  has been linked to a spate of spear-phishing attacks targeting government, education, and research sectors across the world. The primary targets of the intrusions from May to October 2022 included counties in the Asia Pacific region such as Myanmar, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan, cybersecurity firm Trend Micro  said  in a Friday report.  Mustang Panda, also called Bronze President, Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, and Red Lich, is a China-based espionage actor believed to be active since at least July 2018. The group is known for its use of malware such as China Chopper and PlugX to collect data from compromised environments. Activities of the group chronicled by  ESET ,  Google, Proofpoint ,  Cisco Talos , and  Secureworks  this year have revealed the threat actor's pattern of using PlugX (and its variant called Hodur) to infect a wide range of entities in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Ameri