- APT32 Targeting Wuhan Government and Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management
April 22, 2020
From at least January to April 2020, suspected Vietnamese actors APT32 carried out intrusion campaigns against Chinese targets that Mandiant Threat Intelligence believes was designed to collect intelligence on the COVID-19 crisis. Spear phishing messages were sent by the actor to China’s Ministry of Emergency Management as well as the government of Wuhan province, where COVID-19 ...
- Gamaredon APT Group Use Covid-19 Lure in Campaigns
April 17, 2020
Gamaredon is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that has been active since 2013. Their campaigns are generally known for targeting Ukrainian government institutions. From late 2019 to February of this year, researchers published several reports on Gamaredon, tracking the group’s activities. In March, we came across an email with a malware attachment that used the ...
- APT41 Using New Speculoos Backdoor to Target Organizations Globally
April 13, 2020
On March 25, 2020, FireEye published a research blog regarding a global attack campaign operated by an espionage motivated adversary group known as APT41. This attack campaign was thought to have operated between January 20 and March 11, specifically targeting Citrix, Cisco, and Zoho network appliances via exploitation of recently disclosed vulnerabilities. Based on WildFire and AutoFocus ...
- DarkHotel hackers use VPN zero-day to breach Chinese government agencies
April 6, 2020
Foreign state-sponsored hackers have launched a massive hacking operation aimed at Chinese government agencies and their employees. Attacks began last month, in March, and are believed to be related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Chinese security-firm Qihoo 360, which detected the intrusions, said the hackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Sangfor SSL VPN servers, used to provide ...
- Zero-Day Exploitation Increasingly Demonstrates Access to Money, Rather than Skill — Intelligence for Vulnerability Management, Part One
April 6, 2020
FireEye Mandiant Threat Intelligence documented more zero-days exploited in 2019 than any of the previous three years. While not every instance of zero-day exploitation can be attributed to a tracked group, we noted that a wider range of tracked actors appear to have gained access to these capabilities. Furthermore, we noted a significant increase over ...
- Loncom packer: from backdoors to Cobalt Strike
April 2, 2020
The previous story described an unusual way of distributing malware under disguise of an update for an expired security certificate. After the story went out, we conducted a detailed analysis of the samples we had obtained, with some interesting findings. All of the malware we examined from the campaign was packed with the same packer, which we ...
- Holy water: ongoing targeted water-holing attack in Asia
March 31, 2020
On December 4, 2019, we discovered watering hole websites that were compromised to selectively trigger a drive-by download attack with fake Adobe Flash update warnings. This campaign has been active since at least May 2019, and targets an Asian religious and ethnic group. The threat actor’s unsophisticated but creative toolset has been evolving a lot since ...
- Nation-State Attacks Drop in Latest Google Analysis
March 30, 2020
Google has registered a significant drop in government-backed cyberattacks against its properties and the people who use its products. Google sends out warnings if it detects that an account is a target of government-backed phishing or malware attempts. For 2019, the internet giant sent almost 40,000 warnings – which, while a large number, is still a ...
- Emerging APT Mounts Mass iPhone Surveillance Campaign
March 26, 2020
A recently discovered, mass-targeted watering-hole campaign has been aiming at Apple iPhone users in Hong Kong – infecting website visitors with a newly developed custom surveillance malware. The bad code – the work of a new APT called “TwoSail Junk” – is delivered via a multistage exploit chain that targets iOS vulnerabilities in versions 12.1 ...
- Hacking isn’t canceled: Chinese group attacked Citrix and Zoho during coronavirus lockdown
March 25, 2020
A prolific state-backed Chinese cyber espionage operation started 2020 with one of its largest hacking campaigns – even though the coronavirus lockdown in China appeared to have an impact on the group’s output. The global operation by hacking group APT 41 – widely believed to linked to the Chinese government – targeted businesses in telecoms, manufacturing, healthcare, defence, ...