Tropic Trooper spies on government entities in the Middle East


Tropic Trooper (also known as KeyBoy and Pirate Panda) is an APT group active since 2011. This group has traditionally targeted sectors such as government, healthcare, transportation and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

Kaspersky recent investigation has revealed that in 2024 they conducted persistent campaigns targeting a government entity in the Middle East, starting in June 2023. Sighting this group’s TTPs in critical governmental entities in the Middle East, particularly those related to human rights studies, marks a new strategic move for them. This can help the threat intelligence community better understand the motives of this threat actor.

Read more…
Source: Kaspersky


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Bruised but Not Broken: The Resurgence of the Emotet Botnet Malware

    May 19, 2022

    The Emotet botnet malware is well known in the cybersecurity industry for its success in using spam emails to compromise machines and then selling access to these machines as part of its infamous malware-as-a-service (MaaS) scheme. Operators behind notorious threats such as the Trickbot trojan and the Ryuk or Conti ransomware are among the malicious ...

  • Weaponization of Excel Add-Ins Part 2: Dridex Infection Chain Case Studies

    May 19, 2022

    In Part 1 of this two-part blog series, Unit 42 researchers discussed briefly how XLL files are exploited to deploy Agent Tesla. During December 2021, they continued to observe Dridex and Agent Tesla exploiting XLL in different ways for initial payload delivery. A more in-depth look at the Dridex infection chain follows. Threat actors behind Dridex ...

  • Protecting Android users from 0-Day attacks

    May 19, 2022

    To protect our users, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) routinely hunts for 0-day vulnerabilities exploited in-the-wild. In 2021, we reported nine 0-days affecting Chrome, Android, Apple and Microsoft, leading to patches to protect users from these attacks. This blog is a follow up to our July 2021 post on four 0-day vulnerabilities we discovered in 2021, ...

  • Threat Actors Chaining Unpatched VMware Vulnerabilities for Full System Control

    May 18, 2022

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is releasing this Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to warn organizations that malicious cyber actors, likely advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, are exploiting CVE-2022-22954 and CVE-2022-22960 separately and in combination. These vulnerabilities affect certain versions of VMware Workspace ONE Access, VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud ...

  • Hydra with Three Heads: BlackByte & The Future of Ransomware Subsidiary Groups

    May 18, 2022

    On February 13, 2022, a novel, lesser-known ransomware collective posted the alleged financial documents of the San Francisco 49ers football team on their underground site. The threat group, known as BlackByte, was widely credited with the orchestration of the attack—However, AdvIntel’s sensitive primary-source intelligence and factual data evidence (including IOCs) point to a different conclusion: ...

  • Wizard Spider hackers hire cold callers to scare ransomware victims into paying up

    May 18, 2022

    Researchers have exposed the inner workings of Wizard Spider, a hacking group that pours its illicit proceeds back into the criminal enterprise. On Wednesday, PRODAFT published the results of an investigation into Wizard Spider, believed to either be or be associated with the Grim Spider and Lunar Spider hacking groups. According to the cybersecurity firm, Wizard Spider, ...