Security News > 2020 > May > Naikon APT Hid Five-Year Espionage Attack Under Radar

After five years under the radar, the Naikon APT group has been unmasked in a long-term espionage campaign against several governments in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Chinese APT group was first uncovered by Kaspersky researchers in 2015, in attacks against top-level government agencies around the South China Sea.

"Naikon attempted to attack one of our customers by impersonating a foreign government - that's when they came back onto our radar after a five-year absence, and we decided to investigate further," said Lotem Finkelsteen, manager of threat intelligence at Check Point, in a Thursday analysis.

In addition to collecting sensitive data, Naikon would also use the infrastructures and servers of its victims to launch new attacks, which is what researchers believe helped the group evade detection for so long.

"Naikon's primary method of attack is to infiltrate a government body, then use that body's contacts, documents and data to launch attacks on others, exploiting the trust and diplomatic relations between departments and governments to increase the chances of its attack succeeding," said researchers.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/naikon-apt-five-year-espionage-attack/155492/