Security News
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission formally announced it will no longer authorize electronic equipment from Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision, and Dahua, deeming them an "Unacceptable" national security threat. All these Chinese telecom and video surveillance companies were previously included in the Covered List as of March 12, 2021.
The United Kingdom has decided Chinese video cameras have no place in government facilities. Government departments have also been "Advised that no such equipment should be connected to departmental core networks" and told to consider whether they should remove and replace Chinese video cameras "Deployed on sensitive sites" - and do so before planned upgrades.
A notorious advanced persistent threat actor known as Mustang Panda has been linked to a spate of spear-phishing attacks targeting government, education, and research sectors across the world. Mustang Panda, also called Bronze President, Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, and Red Lich, is a China-based espionage actor believed to be active since at least July 2018.
State-backed Chinese hackers launched a spearphishing campaign to deliver custom malware stored in Google Drive to government, research, and academic organizations worldwide. The Chinese hackers used Google accounts to send their targets email messages with lures that tricked them into downloading custom malware from Google Drive links.
Users clicking on a link sent through the messaging app are directed to an actor-controlled site, which, in turn, sends them to a landing domain impersonating a well-known brand, from where the victims are once again taken to sites distributing fraudulent apps and bogus rewards. Attacks wherein scammy mobile ads are clicked from an Android device have been observed to culminate in the deployment of a mobile trojan called Triada, which was recently spotted propagating via fake WhatsApp apps.
A cyberespionage threat actor tracked as Billbug has been running a campaign targeting a certificate authority, government agencies, and defense organizations in several countries in Asia. Symantec hasn't determined how Billbug gains initial access to the target networks but they have seen evidence of this happening by exploiting public-facing apps with known vulnerabilities.
A previously undocumented Android spyware tool named 'BadBazaar' has been discovered targeting ethnic and religious minorities in China, most notably the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Uyghurs, a regional Muslim minority of roughly 13 million people, have suffered extreme oppression from the central Chinese government due to their cultural deviation from typical eastern Chinese values.
The ByteDance-owned platform, which currently stores European user data in the U.S. and Singapore, said the revision is part of its ongoing data governance efforts to limit employee access to users in the region, minimize data flows outside of it, and store the information locally. "Based on a demonstrated need to do their job, subject to a series of robust security controls and approval protocols, and by way of methods that are recognised under the GDPR, we allow certain employees within our corporate group located in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and the U.S. remote access to TikTok European user data," the company said.
The Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as Stone Panda has been observed employing a new stealthy infection chain in its attacks aimed at Japanese entities. The latest set of attacks, observed between March and June 2022, involve the use of a bogus Microsoft Word file and a self-extracting archive file in RAR format propagated via spear-phishing emails, leading to the execution of a backdoor called LODEINFO. While the maldoc requires users to enable macros to activate the killchain, the June 2022 campaign was found to drop this method in favor of an SFX file that, when executed, displays a harmless decoy Word document to conceal the malicious activities.
Chen Xinjun, dean of the College of Marine Sciences at Shanghai Ocean University, made the remarks in response to recent accusations by foreign reporters and actor Leonardo DiCaprio that China is depleting its own fish stock and that Chinese boats have sailed to other waters to continue deep-sea fishing, particularly near Ecuador, affecting local fish stocks in the South American nation. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.