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:
- Why is it so rare to hear about Western cyber-attacks?
June 23, 2023
A cyber-attack that took over iPhones at a Russian technology company is being blamed on US government hackers. Could the attack, and the response from the Russian government, be rewriting the narrative of who the good guys and bad guys are in cyber-space? Camaro Dragon, Fancy Bear, Static Kitten and Stardust Chollima – these aren’t the ...
- Beyond the horizon: Traveling the world on Camaro Dragon’s USB flash drives
June 22, 2023
In early 2023, the Check Point Incident Response Team (CPIRT) team investigated a malware incident at a European healthcare institution involving a set of tools mentioned in the Avast report in late 2022. The incident was attributed to Camaro Dragon, a Chinese-based espionage threat actor whose activities overlap with activities tracked by different researchers as Mustang ...
- Military AI’s Next Frontier: Your Work Computer
June 22, 2023
It’s probably hard to imagine that you are the target of spycraft, but spying on employees is the next frontier of military AI. Surveillance techniques familiar to authoritarian dictatorships have now been repurposed to target American workers. Over the past decade, a few dozen companies have emerged to sell your employer subscriptions for services like “open ...
- Graphican: Flea uses new backdoor in attacks targeting Foreign Ministries
June 21, 2023
The Flea (aka APT15, Nickel) advanced persistent threat (APT) group continued to focus on foreign ministries in a recent attack campaign that ran from late 2022 into early 2023 in which it leveraged a new backdoor called Backdoor.Graphican. This campaign was primarily focused on foreign affairs ministries in the Americas, although the group also targeted a ...
- Dissecting TriangleDB, a Triangulation spyware implant
June 21, 2023
Over the years, there have been multiple cases when iOS devices were infected with targeted spyware such as Pegasus, Predator, Reign and others. Often, the process of infecting a device involves launching a chain of different exploits. Due to this granularity, discovering one exploit in the chain often does not result in retrieving the rest ...
- Barracuda ESG Zero-Day Vulnerability (CVE-2023-2868) Exploited Globally by Aggressive and Skilled Actor, Suspected Links to China
June 15, 2023
Starting as early as October 10, 2022, UNC4841 sent emails to victim organizations that contained malicious file attachments designed to exploit CVE-2023-2868 to gain initial access to vulnerable Barracuda ESG appliances. Over the course of their campaign, UNC4841 has primarily relied upon three principal code families to establish and maintain a presence on an ESG appliance, ...

