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:

  • IronHusky updates the forgotten MysterySnail RAT to target Russia and Mongolia

    April 17, 2025

    Day after day, threat actors create new malware to use in cyberattacks. Each of these new implants is developed in its own way, and as a result gets its own destiny – while the use of some malware families is reported for decades, information about others disappears after days, months or several years. Kaspersky researchers observed ...

  • EU gives staff ‘burner phones, laptops’ for US visits

    April 15, 2025

    The European Commission is giving staffers visiting the US on official business burner laptops and phones to avoid espionage attempts, according to the Financial Times. The use of clean and locked-down hardware is common practice for anyone visiting China, Russia, and other states where aggressive electronic surveillance is expected. Apparently the European Union has added the ...

  • BPFDoor’s Hidden Controller Used Against Asia, Middle East Targets

    April 14, 2025

    The stealthy rootkit-like malware known as BPFDoor (detected as Backdoor.Linux.BPFDOOR) is a backdoor with strong stealth capabilities, most of them related to its use of Berkeley Packet Filtering (BPF). In a previous article, Trend Micro researchers covered how BPFDoor and BPF-enabled malware work. BPFDoor has been active for at least four years, with a report by ...

  • Suspected Kimsuky (APT-Q-2) attacks South Korean companies

    April 11, 2025

    Kimsuky, alias Mystery Baby, Baby Coin, Smoke Screen, Black Banshe, etc., is tracked internally by Qi’anxin as APT-Q-2. The APT group was publicly disclosed in 2013, with attack activity dating as far back as 2012. Kimsuky’s main target for attacks has been South Korea, involving defense, education, energy, government, healthcare, and think tanks, with a focus ...

  • GOFFEE continues to attack organizations in Russia

    April 10, 2025

    GOFFEE is a threat actor that first came to our attention in early 2022. Since then, Kaspersky researchers have observed malicious activities targeting exclusively entities located in the Russian Federation, leveraging spear phishing emails with a malicious attachment. Starting in May 2022 and up until summer of 2023, GOFFEE deployed modified Owowa (malicious IIS module) in ...

  • Court document reveals locations of WhatsApp victims targeted by NSO spyware

    April 9, 2025

    NSO Group’s notorious spyware Pegasus was used to target 1,223 WhatsApp users in 51 different countries during a 2019 hacking campaign, according to a new court document. The document was published on Friday as part of the lawsuit that Meta-owned WhatsApp filed against NSO Group in 2019, accusing the surveillance tech maker of exploiting a ...