MOONSHINE Exploit Kit and DarkNimbus Backdoor Enabling Earth Minotaur’s Multi-Platform Attacks


Trend Micro researchers have been continuously monitoring the MOONSHINE exploit kit’s activity since 2019. During our research, they discovered a MOONSHINE exploit kit server with improper operational security: Its server exposed MOONSHINE’s toolkits and operation logs, which revealed the information of possible victims and the attack tactics of a threat actor we have named Earth Minotaur.

MOONSHINE was first discovered as part of malicious activities against the Tibetan community, and is believed to also be associated with previous malicious activities against Uyghurs. It’s designed to implant a backdoor by exploiting the vulnerabilities of instant messaging apps on Android mobile devices.

Read more…
Source: Trend Micro


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Ryuk Ransomware Keeps Targeting Hospitals During the Pandemic

    March 26, 2020

    The Ryuk Ransomware operators to continue to target hospitals even as these organizations are overwhelmed during the Coronavirus pandemic. Last week BleepingComputer contacted various ransomware groups and asked if they would target hospitals and other healthcare organizations during the pandemic. With the amount of strain healthcare organizations are under during this pandemic, I was hoping that ransomware operators would ...

  • Ransomware Maze

    March 26, 2020

    The Maze ransomware, previously known in the community as “ChaCha ransomware”, was discovered on May the 29th 2019 by Jerome Segura. The main goal of the ransomware is to crypt all files that it can in an infected system and then demand a ransom to recover the files. However, the most important characteristic of Maze is the ...

  • 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, ...

  • WildPressure APT targets industrial-related entities in the Middle East

    March 24, 2020

    In August 2019, Kaspersky discovered a malicious campaign distributing a fully fledged C++ Trojan that we call Milum. All the victims we registered were organizations from the Middle East. At least some of them are related to industrial sector. Our Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine (KTAE) doesn’t show any code similarities with known campaigns. Nor have ...

  • Monitoring ICS Cyber Operation Tools and Software Exploit Modules To Anticipate Future Threats

    March 23, 2020

    There has only been a small number of broadly documented cyber attacks targeting operational technologies (OT) / industrial control systems (ICS) over the last decade. While fewer attacks is clearly a good thing, the lack of an adequate sample size to determine risk thresholds can make it difficult for defenders to understand the threat environment, ...