Security News
Akamai reports having mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever launched against a customer based in the Asia-Pacific region. DDoS is an attack that involves sending a large volume of garbage requests to a targeted server, depleting its capacity, and thus rendering the websites, applications, or other online services it hosts unreachable by legitimate users.
Government entities in Asia-Pacific and North America are being targeted by an unknown threat actor with an off-the-shelf malware downloader known as PureCrypter to deliver an array of information stealers and ransomware. "The PureCrypter campaign uses the domain of a compromised non-profit organization as a command-and-control to deliver a secondary payload," Menlo Security researcher Abhay Yadav said.
Materials research organizations in Asia have been targeted by a previously unknown threat actor using a distinct set of tools. Symantec, by Broadcom Software, is tracking the cluster under the moniker Clasiopa.
Shipping companies and medical laboratories in Asia have been the subject of a suspected espionage campaign carried out by a never-before-seen threat actor dubbed Hydrochasma. The standout aspects of the campaign is the absence of data exfiltration and custom malware, with the threat actor employing open source tools for intelligence gathering.
According to a report by Symantec's Threat Hunter team that dives into the activity, the intelligence-gathering attacks have been underway since at least early 2021 and are still ongoing. Symantec presents an example of an attack that unfolded in April 2022 to showcase how the espionage group compromises its government targets.
Facebook parent company Meta disclosed that it took action against two espionage operations in South Asia that leveraged its social media platforms to distribute malware to potential targets. The first set of activities is what the company described as "Persistent and well-resourced" and undertaken by a hacking group tracked under the moniker Bitter APT targeting individuals in New Zealand, India, Pakistan and the U.K. "Bitter used various malicious tactics to target people online with social engineering and infect their devices with malware," Meta said in its Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report.
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.
A previously undocumented Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat actor dubbed Aoqin Dragon has been linked to a string of espionage-oriented attacks aimed at government, education, and telecom entities chiefly in Southeast Asia and Australia dating as far back as 2013. This involved leveraging old and unpatched security vulnerabilities, with the decoy documents enticing targets into opening the files.
The advanced persistent threat gang known as SideWinder has gone on an attack spree in the last two years, conducting almost 1,000 raids and deploying increasingly sophisticated attack methods. Noushin Shaba, a senior security researcher on Kaspersky's global research and analysis team, today told the Black Hat Asia conference that SideWinder mostly targets military and law enforcement agencies in Pakistan, Bangladesh and other South Asian nations.
An espionage-focused threat actor known for targeting China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia has expanded to set its sights on Bangladeshi government organizations as part of an ongoing campaign that commenced in August 2021. Cybersecurity firm Cisco Talos attributed the activity with moderate confidence to a hacking group dubbed the Bitter APT based on overlaps in the command-and-control infrastructure with that of prior campaigns mounted by the same actor.