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:
- SolarWinds hack analysis reveals 56% boost in command server footprint
April 22, 2021
A new analysis of the SolarWinds breach suggests that the attacker infrastructure behind the campaign is far larger than first believed. The catastrophic SolarWinds security incident involved the compromise of the vendor’s network and later the deployment of malicious SolarWinds Orion updates to clients that contained a backdoor called Sunburst. Sunspot, designed to monitor the SolarWinds build ...
- White House: Here’s what we’ve learned from tackling the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange Server cyber incidents
April 21, 2021
Lessons learned from responses to the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange cyber incidents will be used to coordinate action against future cybersecurity and hacking incidents, the White House has said. Both incidents required the United States to react to cyberattacks by nation-state hacking operations affecting thousands of organisations across the country – Russian intelligence compromised SolarWinds in ...
- It was Russia wot did it: SolarWinds hack was done by Kremlin’s APT29 crew, say UK and US
April 15, 2021
Russia’s infamous APT 29, aka Cozy Bear, was behind the SolarWinds Orion attack, the US and UK governments said today as America slapped sanctions on Russian infosec companies as well as expelling diplomats from that country’s US embassy. One of the sanctioned companies is Positive Technologies, familiar in the West for, among other things, in-depth research ...
- Crossing the Line: When Cyberattacks Become Acts of War
April 7, 2021
The Cold War concept isn’t outdated. In the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the battleground has simply shifted from conflicts between ideological proxy governments to cyberspace. And the opponents have grown from a few primary nations into a broad range of sovereign threat actors. The question is, when does a cyberattack cross the ...
- APT Charming Kitten Pounces on Medical Researchers
March 31, 2021
Security researchers have linked a late-2020 phishing campaign aimed at stealing credentials from 25 senior professionals at medical research organizations in the United States and Israel to an advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran called Charming Kitten. The campaign—dubbed BadBlood because of its medical focus and the history of tensions between Iran and Israel–aimed ...
- APT10: sophisticated multi-layered loader Ecipekac discovered in A41APT campaign
March 30, 2021
In 2019, we observed an APT campaign targeting multiple industries, including the Japanese manufacturing industry and its overseas operations, that was designed to steal information. We named the campaign A41APT (not APT41) which is derived from the host name “DESKTOP-A41UVJV” from the attacker’s system used in the initial infection. The actor leveraged vulnerabilities in Pulse ...

