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
Related:
- Phishing Spy Campaign Targets Top Mideast Officials
May 15, 2018
Researchers have discovered a phishing campaign that infected Android devices with custom surveillance-ware bent on extracting data from top officials, primarily in the Middle East. Researchers at Lookout Security told Threatpost that the tool, dubbed Stealth Mango, has been used to collect over 30 gigabytes of compromised data on attacker infrastructure, including call records, audio recordings, device ...
- Ex-CIA man named as suspect in Vault 7 leak
May 15, 2018
A former CIA employee has been named as the prime suspect in last year’s dump of thousands of documents on the agency’s hacking practices. A report from The Washington Post cites court documents that name Joshua Adam Schulte as the person authorities think to be behind the massive Vault7 data dump. Read more… Source: The Register
- 1.5 billion sensitive files exposed by misconfigured servers, storage and cloud services
April 5, 2018
Researchers have discovered over 1.5 billion sensitive files including payroll information, credit card details, medical data, and patents for intellectual property are exposed online, putting consumers and businesses at risk of theft, cybercrime, and espionage. But the information exposed online — which amounts to a total of 12,000 terabytes of data — isn’t there as a ...
- FBI: Iranian Firm Stole Data In Massive Spear Phishing Campaign
March 26, 2018
The United States Department of Justice announced charges against nine Iranians accused of stealing private data from U.S. universities, private companies and U.S. government agencies. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich said in a statement that the state-sponsored hackers worked for more than four years to steal expensive science and engineering-related research, company trade secrets, and sensitive U.S. government ...
- Slingshot Malware ‘Was US Special Operations Spy Tool’
March 22, 2018
Malware discovered by Kaspersky Lab was developed by an elite group within the US military to spy on militants, officials say A highly advanced malware strain uncovered by Kaspersky Lab earlier this month was in fact developed by an elite US military unit, which was using it to track down militants associated with Islamic State and ...
- Spy malware secrets: How complex ‘Slingshot’ hit targets via hacked routers
March 12, 2018
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered espionage malware that appears to have been developed by a government to spy on targets across Africa and the Middle East for the past six years. The researchers haven’t named Slingshot’s country of origin, but note the presence of debug messages written in perfect English, while various component names such ...