Operation Soft Cell: Chinese Hackers Breach Middle East Telecom Providers
Mar 23, 2023
Critical Infrastructure Security
Telecommunication providers in the Middle East are the subject of new cyber attacks that commenced in the first quarter of 2023. The intrusion set has been attributed to a Chinese cyber espionage actor associated with a long-running campaign dubbed Operation Soft Cell based on tooling overlaps. "The initial attack phase involves infiltrating Internet-facing Microsoft Exchange servers to deploy web shells used for command execution," researchers from SentinelOne and QGroup said in a new technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Once a foothold is established, the attackers conduct a variety of reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, and data exfiltration activities." Operation Soft Cell, according to Cybereason , refers to malicious activities undertaken by China-affiliated actors targeting telecommunications providers since at least 2012. The Soft Cell threat actor, also tracked by Microsoft as Gallium , is known to target unpa...