Unit 42 researchers recently found that Stately Taurus abused the popular Visual Studio Code software in espionage operations targeting government entities in Southeast Asia. Stately Taurus is a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group that carries out cyberespionage attacks.
This threat actor used Visual Studio Code’s embedded reverse shell feature to gain a foothold in target networks. This is a relatively new technique that a security researcher discovered in 2023. According to our telemetry, this is the first time a threat actor used it in the wild.
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Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
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