Security News

According to the report, the APTs are acting independently of each other but share the same overall goal of targeting journalists. Often posing as journalists themselves, the threat actors have focused on phishing campaigns with the goal of credential harvesting, theft of data helpful to specific regimes and digital surveillance of political journalists.

APT hacking groups and ransomware operations are moving away from Cobalt Strike to the newer Brute Ratel post-exploitation toolkit to evade detection by EDR and antivirus solutions. In 2020, Chetan Nayak, an ex-red teamer at Mandiant and CrowdStrike, released Brute Ratel Command and Control Center as an alternative to Cobalt Strike for red team penetration testing engagements.

Military entities located in Bangladesh continue to be at the receiving end of sustained cyberattacks by an advanced persistent threat tracked as Bitter. "Through malicious document files and...

Entities located in Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Pakistan are in the crosshairs of an attack campaign that targets unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers as an initial access vector to deploy the ShadowPad malware. "During the initial attacks, the group exploited an MS Exchange vulnerability to deploy ShadowPad malware and infiltrated building automation systems of one of the victims," the company said.

An advanced persistent threat group, dubbed ToddyCat, is believed behind a series of attacks targeting Microsoft Exchange servers of high-profile government and military installations in Asia and Europe. "The first wave of attacks exclusively targeted Microsoft Exchange Servers, which were compromised with Samurai, a sophisticated passive backdoor that usually works on ports 80 and 443," wrote Giampaolo Dedola security researcher at Kaspersky, in a report outlining the APT. Researchers said ToddyCat a is relatively new APT and there is "Little information about this actor."

An advanced persistent threat group dubbed ToddyCat has been targeting Microsoft Exchange servers throughout Asia and Europe for more than a year, since at least December 2020. At the time, the hacking group exploited the ProxyLogon Exchange flaws that allowed them to gain remote code execution on vulnerable servers to deploy China Chopper web shells.

An advanced persistent threat group dubbed ToddyCat has been targeting Microsoft Exchange servers throughout Asia and Europe for more than a year, since at least December 2020. At the time, the hacking group exploited the ProxyLogon Exchange flaws that allowed them to gain remote code execution on vulnerable servers to deploy China Chopper web shells.

Researchers have identified a small yet potent China-linked APT that has flown under the radar for nearly a decade running campaigns against government, education and telecommunication organizations in Southeast Asia and Australia. Researchers from SentinelLabs said the APT, which they dubbed Aoqin Dragon, has been operating since at least 2013.

Chinese-linked threat actors are now actively exploiting a Microsoft Office zero-day vulnerability to execute malicious code remotely on Windows systems. This Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool remote code execution flaw impacts all Windows client and server platforms still receiving security updates.

Most advanced persistent threat groups use known vulnerabilities in their attacks against organizations, suggesting the need to prioritize faster patching rather than chasing zero-day flaws as a more effective security strategy, new research has found. One belief the research debunked is that all APTs are highly sophisticated and prefer attacking zero-day flaws rather than ones that have already been patched.