A recently disclosed cyber espionage operation, dubbed LapDogs, has drawn scrutiny following revelations from SecurityScorecard’s Strike Team. The operation, believed to be conducted by China-aligned threat actors, has quietly infiltrated over 1,000 devices across the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
What makes this campaign distinctive is its use of hijacked SOHO routers and IoT hardware, transforming them into Operational Relay Boxes (ORBs) for sustained surveillance. LapDogs is an ongoing campaign, active since September 2023, targeting real estate, media, municipal, and IT sectors. Devices from known vendors such as Buffalo Technology and Ruckus Wireless have reportedly been compromised.
Read more…
Source:TechRadar News
Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.
Related:
- ‘Unprecedented’ DNS Hijacking Attacks Linked to Iran
January 10, 2019
The attacks, targeting several countries to redirect traffic and harvest credentials, have been linked to Iran. A wave of DNS hijacking attacks targeting victims in North America, Europe, Middle East and North Africa have been linked to Iran. The attacks, which have been ongoing over the past two years, have had “a high degree of success” ...
- New tool automates phishing attacks that bypass 2FA
January 9, 2019
A new penetration testing tool published at the start of the year by a security researcher can automate phishing attacks with an ease never seen before and can even blow through login operations for accounts protected by two-factor authentication (2FA). Named Modlishka –the English pronunciation of the Polish word for mantis– this new tool was created ...
- Ransomware MongoLock Immediately Deletes Files, Formats Backup Drives
January 8, 2019
We have been following a new wave of MongoLock ransomware attacks that immediately deletes files upon infection instead of encrypting it, and further scans for other available folders and drives for file deletion. In the wild since December 2018, the ransomware demands a payment of 0.1 bitcoin from victims within 24 hours to retrieve the ...
- Your Word is Your Bond: Trust and Ethics in Underground Forums
January 7, 2019
Although the general public thinks of underground forums as a place where scams and suspicious dealings are rampant, the opposite is usually true: the threat actors who inhabit these sites often consider their reputation a major asset. Many of the individuals and groups in underground forums go to great lengths to ensure that transactions go through ...
- Spyware Disguises as Android Applications on Google Play
January 3, 2019
Trend Micro discovered a spyware (detected as ANDROIDOS_MOBSTSPY) which disguised itself as legitimate Android applications to gather information from users. The applications were available for download on Google Play in 2018, with some recorded to have already been downloaded over 100,000 times by users from all over the world. One of the applications we initially investigated ...
- A Dozen Flaws in Popular Mac Clean-Up Software Allow Local Root Access
January 3, 2019
A passel of privilege-escalation vulnerabilities in MacPaw’s CleanMyMac X software would allow a local attacker to gain root access to an Apple machine in various ways. CleanMyMac X is a cleanup application for MacOS that optimizes the drives and frees up space by scanning for unused, redundant or unnecessary files and deleting them. No fewer than ...