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:
- Cloud Atlas activity in the first half of 2025: what changed
December 19, 2025
Known since 2014, the Cloud Atlas group targets countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Infections occur via phishing emails containing a malicious document that exploits an old vulnerability in the Microsoft Office Equation Editor process (CVE-2018-0802) to download and execute malicious code. In this report, Kaspersky researchers describe the infection chain and tools that the ...
- CISA and Partners Release Update to Malware Analysis Report BRICKSTORM Backdoor
December 19, 2025
Today, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), National Security Agency, and Canadian Centre for Cyber Security released an update to the Malware Analysis Report BRICKSTORM Backdoor with indicators of compromise (IOCs) and detection signatures for additional BRICKSTORM samples. This update provides information on additional samples, including Rust-based samples. These samples demonstrate advanced persistence and defense ...
- FBI: Senior U.S. Officials Continue to be Impersonated in Malicious Messaging Campaign
December 19, 2025
This is an update to Public Service Announcement I-051525-PSA, released May 15, 2025, which can be found here. Activity dating back to 2023 reveals malicious actors have impersonated senior U.S. state government, White House, and Cabinet level officials, as well as members of Congress to target individuals, including officials’ family members and personal acquaintances. If ...
- Operation ForumTroll continues: Russian political scientists targeted using plagiarism reports
December 17, 2025
In March 2025, we discovered Operation ForumTroll, a series of sophisticated cyberattacks exploiting the CVE-2025-2783 vulnerability in Google Chrome. Kaspersky researchers previously detailed the malicious implants used in the operation: the LeetAgent backdoor and the complex spyware Dante, developed by Memento Labs (formerly Hacking Team). However, the attackers behind this operation didn’t stop at their ...
- Amazon security boss blames Russia’s GRU for years-long energy-sector hacks
December 15, 2025
Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) is behind a years-long campaign targeting energy, telecommunications, and tech providers, stealing credentials and compromising misconfigured devices hosted on AWS to give the Kremlin’s snoops persistent access to sensitive networks, according to Amazon’s security boss. “The campaign demonstrates sustained focus on Western critical infrastructure, particularly the energy sector, with operations spanning ...
- NANOREMOTE, cousin of FINALDRAFT
December 11, 2025
In October 2025, Elastic Security Labs discovered a newly-observed Windows backdoor in telemetry. The fully-featured backdoor Elastic Security Lab call NANOREMOTE shares characteristics with malware described in REF7707 and is similar to the FINALDRAFT implant. One of the malware’s primary features is centered around shipping data back and forth from the victim endpoint using the Google ...