SugarGh0st RAT Used to Target American Artificial Intelligence Experts


Proofpoint recently identified a SugarGh0st RAT campaign targeting organizations in the United States involved in artificial intelligence efforts, including those in academia, private industry, and government service.

Proofpoint tracks the cluster responsible for this activity as UNK_SweetSpecter. SugarGh0st RAT is a remote access trojan, and is a customized variant of Gh0stRAT, an older commodity trojan typically used by Chinese-speaking threat actors. SugarGh0st RAT has been historically used to target users in Central and East Asia, as first reported by Cisco Talos in November 2023.

Read more…
Source: ProofPoint


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Germany says lawmakers’ iPhones may have been hacked with spyware

    November 2, 2026

    The German government is warning politicians and public figures that they were targeted by government-backed spyware, days after Apple began sending out notifications warning victims that their iPhones may have been hacked. Germany’s federal cybersecurity office, known as the BSI, said in a note over the weekend that it had become aware that members of the ...

  • Chinese hackers spied on thousands of companies after breaching IT giant ConnectWise

    October 22, 2026

    The bad week for cybersecurity just got worse for thousands more companies, who were spied on by Chinese hackers following the breach of IT management and remote access giant ConnectWise. Security researchers at Microsoft say the China state-aligned hackers broke into ConnectWise’s cloud backup service and stole application credentials that are used to establish data links ...

  • How APT41 revived the BlackLotus bootkit to attack diplomatic organizations in Central Asia

    October 22, 2026

    Back in October 2022, Kaspersky GReAT was looking into a peculiar advertisement on a hacking forum. A cybercriminal had been advertising a UEFI bootkit, dubbed BlackLotus, that could bypass Secure Boot, for $5,000. Given the low price for such powerful capabilities, the cybersecurity community initially took this advertisement with a grain of salt. As no ...

  • AI-Powered Espionage Campaign Targets Government Linux Infrastructure

    October 15, 2026

    Unit 42 identified a campaign targeting government entities and state-affiliated infrastructure, with observed activity spanning from October 2025–April 2026. We track this activity as CL-UNK-1211. In the operations we witnessed, the attackers relied on AI-generated payloads. Multiple artifacts deployed throughout the intrusion contained AI-made conversational annotations and developer reasoning comments, suggesting that the code was either ...

  • Governments are hacking people with ‘zero-click’ spyware by showing them online ads

    October 15, 2026

    Security researchers at digital rights unit The Citizen Lab say government spyware makers are abusing global advertising networks to target and hack devices by serving malicious online adverts. A new report published Thursday by the University of Toronto lab, which investigates surveillance and digital rights abuses, said an Israeli company called Discover-Tech allows spyware makers to ...

  • Iranian Cyber Targeting of Dissidents, Activists and Journalists

    September 15, 2026

    CHOSEN BRICK is a malware family that has been used to target individuals around the world including in the UK, US and the Netherlands from at least 2025. CHOSEN BRICK enables Iranian state cyber actors to collect information on a target’s contacts, emails and social media messages, which could enable tracking of their movements. Iran almost ...