Security News
A threat actor has taken to a forum for news and discussion of data breaches with an offer to sell what they assert is a database containing records of over a billion Chinese civilians - allegedly stolen from the Shanghai Police. HackerDan released sample datasets: one containing delivery addresses and often instructions for drivers; another with police records; and the last with personal identification information like name, national ID number address, height, and gender.
An anonymous threat actor is selling several databases they claim to contain more than 22 terabytes of stolen information on roughly 1 billion Chinese citizens for 10 bitcoins. Based on the information they shared regarding the allegedly stolen data, the databases contain Chinese national residents' names, addresses, national ID numbers, contact info numbers, and several billion criminal records.
Following heightened worries that U.S. users' data had been accessed by TikTok engineers in China between September 2021 and January 2022, the company sought to assuage U.S. lawmakers that it's taking steps to "Strengthen data security." "Employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok U.S. user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team," TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote in the memo.
The novel loader, dubbed Nimbda, is "Bundled with a Chinese language greyware 'SMS Bomber' tool that is most likely illegally distributed in the Chinese-speaking web," Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point said in a report. "Whoever crafted the Nim loader took special care to give it the same executable icon as the SMS Bomber that it drops and executes," the researchers said.
Two Chinese hacking groups conducting cyber espionage and stealing intellectual property from Japanese and western companies are deploying ransomware as a decoy to cover up their malicious activities. Threat analysts from Secureworks say that the use of ransomware in espionage operations is done to obscure their tracks, make attribution harder, and create a powerful distraction for defenders.
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new campaign attributed to the Chinese "Tropic Trooper" hacking group, which employs a novel loader called Nimbda and a new variant of the Yahoyah trojan. The trojan is bundled in a greyware tool named 'SMS Bomber,' which is used for denial of service attacks against phones, flooding them with messages.
A sophisticated Chinese advanced persistent threat actor exploited a critical security vulnerability in Sophos' firewall product that came to light earlier this year to infiltrate an unnamed South Asian target as part of a highly-targeted attack. "The attacker implement[ed] an interesting web shell backdoor, create[d] a secondary form of persistence, and ultimately launch[ed] attacks against the customer's staff," Volexity said in a report.
The Gallium group, believed to be a Chinese state-sponsored team, is going on the warpath with an upgraded remote access trojan that threat hunters say is difficult to detect. The backdoor, once in a compromised system, comes in three variants, each of which can communicate with the command-and-control system in one of three protocols: ICMP, HTTPS and raw TCP. All three PingPull variants have the same functionality, but each creates a custom string of code that it sends to the C2 server, which will use the unique string to identify the compromised system.
A Chinese advanced persistent threat known as Gallium has been observed using a previously undocumented remote access trojan in its espionage attacks targeting companies operating in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa. Called PingPull, the "Difficult-to-detect" backdoor is notable for its use of the Internet Control Message Protocol for command-and-control communications, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 today.
Since 2020, Chinese state-sponsored threat actors have operated large attack campaigns exploiting publicly identified security vulnerabilities. In these campaigns, the attackers receive valid account access by exploiting Virtual Private Network vulnerabilities or other Internet-facing services without using their own distinctive or identifying malware, making it harder for threat intelligence analysts to evaluate the threat.