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:

  • Exposed Docker Server Abused to Drop Cryptominer, DDoS Bot

    September 8, 2020

    Malicious actors continue to target environments running Docker containers. We recently encountered an attack that drops both a malicious cryptocurrency miner and a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) bot on a Docker container built using Alpine Linux as its base image. A similar attack was also reported by Trend Micro in May; in that previous attack, threat ...

  • Chilean bank shuts down all branches following ransomware attack

    September 7, 2020

    BancoEstado, one of Chile’s three biggest banks, was forced to shut down all branches on Monday following a ransomware attack that took place over the weekend. “Our branches will not be operational and will remain closed today,” the bank said in a statement published on its Twitter account on Monday. Details about the attack have not been ...

  • France warns of Emotet attacking companies, administration

    September 7, 2020

    The French national cyber-security agency today published an alert warning of a surge in Emotet attacks targeting the private sector and public administration entities throughout the country. French public administration has three sub-sectors: central public administrations (APUC), local government (LUFA), and social security administrations (ASSO). Emotet, originally a run-of-the-mill banking Trojan first spotted in 2014, is now ...

  • Ransomware attack halts Argentinian border crossing for four hours

    September 6, 2020

    Argentina’s official immigration agency, Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, suffered a Netwalker ransomware attack that temporarily halted border crossing into and out of the country. While ransomware attacks against cities and local agencies have become all too common, this may be a first known attack against a federal agency that has interrupted a country’s operations. According to a ...

  • FBI issues second alert about ProLock ransomware stealing data

    September 4, 2020

    The FBI issued a second warning this week to alert US companies of ProLock ransomware operators stealing data from compromised networks before encrypting their victims’ systems. The 20200901-001 Private Industry Notification seen by BleepingComputer on September 1st comes after the MI-000125-MW Flash Alert on the same subject issued by the FBI four months ago, on May ...

  • Thanos Ransomware: Destructive Variant Targeting State-Run Organizations in the Middle East and North Africa

    September 4, 2020

    On July 6 and July 9, 2020, we observed files associated with an attack on two state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa that ultimately installed and ran a variant of the Thanos ransomware. The Thanos variant created a text file that displayed a ransom message requesting the victim transfer “20,000$” into a ...