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
Related:
- Operation ShadowHammer: a high-profile supply chain attack
April 23, 2019
In late March 2019, we briefly highlighted our research on ShadowHammer attacks, a sophisticated supply chain attack involving ASUS Live Update Utility, which was featured in a Kim Zetter article on Motherboard. The topic was also one of the research announcements made at the SAS conference, which took place in Singapore on April 9-10, 2019. Now it is time to ...
- Source code of Carbanak trojan found on VirusTotal
April 23, 2019
The source code of one of the world’s most dangerous malware strains has been uploaded and left available on VirusTotal for two years, and almost nobody has noticed. It was discovered by security researchers from US cyber-security firm FireEye, analyzed for the past two years, and made public today, so other members of the cyber-security community ...
- FINTEAM: Trojanized TeamViewer Against Government Targets
April 23, 2019
Recently, Check Point researchers spotted a targeted attack against officials within government finance authorities and representatives in several embassies in Europe. The attack, which starts with a malicious attachment disguised as a top secret US document, weaponizes TeamViewer, the popular remote access and desktop sharing software, to gain full control of the infected computer. By investigating ...
- Old-school cruel: Dodgy PDF email attachments enjoying a renaissance
April 19, 2019
The last few months have seen a big increase in malware attacks using PDF email attachments, according to security firm SonicWall. “Increasingly, email, Office documents and now PDFs are the vehicle of choice for malware and fraud in the cyber landscape,” said the outfit’s Bill Conner. There’s nothing new in this, of course, but many recent attacks ...
- Potential Targeted Attack Uses AutoHotkey and Malicious Script Embedded in Excel File to Avoid Detection
April 17, 2019
Trend Micro discovered a potential targeted attack that makes use of legitimate script engine AutoHotkey, in combination with malicious script files. This file is distributed as an email attachment and disguised as a legitimate document with the filename “Military Financing.xlsm.” The user would need to enable macro for it to open fully, which would use ...
- Source code of Iranian cyber-espionage tools leaked on Telegram
April 17, 2019
In an incident reminiscent of the Shadow Brokers leak that exposed the NSA’s hacking tools, someone has now published similar hacking tools belonging to one of Iran’s elite cyber-espionage units, known as APT34, Oilrig, or HelixKitten. The hacking tools are nowhere near as sophisticated as the NSA tools leaked in 2017, but they are dangerous nevertheless. The tools have been ...

