Tibet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Tibetan community has been targeted by a China-nexus cyber espionage group as part of two campaigns conducted last month ahead of the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday on July 6, 2025. The multi-stage attacks have been codenamed Operation GhostChat and Operation PhantomPrayers by Zscaler ThreatLabz. "The attackers compromised a legitimate website, redirecting users via a malicious link and ultimately installing either the Gh0st RAT or PhantomNet (aka SManager) backdoor onto victim systems," security researchers Sudeep Singh and Roy Tay said in a Wednesday report. This is not the first time Chinese threat actors have resorted to watering hole attacks (aka strategic web compromises), a technique where adversaries break into websites frequently visited by a specific group to infect their devices with malware. Over the past two years, hacking groups like EvilBamboo , Evasive Panda , and TAG-112 have all resorted to the approach to target the Tibetan diaspora with the u...

Cybersecurity researchers today unwrapped a new campaign aimed at spying on vulnerable Tibetan communities globally by deploying a malicious Firefox extension on target systems. "Threat actors aligned with the Chinese Communist Party's state interests delivered a customized malicious Mozilla Firefox browser extension that facilitated access and control of users' Gmail accounts," Proofpoint said in an analysis. The Sunnyvale-based enterprise security company pinned the phishing operation on a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) it tracks as  TA413 , which has been previously attributed to attacks against the Tibetan diaspora by leveraging  COVID-themed lures  to deliver the Sepulcher malware with the strategic goal of espionage and civil dissident surveillance. The researchers said the attacks were detected in January and February 2021, a pattern that has continued since March 2020. The infection chain begins with a phishing email impersonating the "Tib...