Security News
A technically sophisticated threat actor known as SeaFlower has been targeting Android and iOS users as part of an extensive campaign that mimics official cryptocurrency wallet websites intending to distribute backdoored apps that drain victims' funds. "As of today, the main current objective of SeaFlower is to modify Web3 wallets with backdoor code that ultimately exfiltrates the seed phrase," Confiant's Taha Karim said in a technical deep-dive of the campaign.
Threat researcher Joey Chen of Sentinel Labs says he's spotted a decade worth of cyber attacks he's happy to attribute to a single Chinese gang. Chen has named the group Aoqin Dragon, says its goal is espionage, and that it prefers targets in Australia, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam.
Named Aoqin Dragon, the hacking group is focused on cyber-espionage, targeting government, education, and telecommunication organizations based in Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Australia. Aoqin Dragon has employed three distinct infection chains since it was first spotted, according to SentinelLabs.
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.
U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have warned about China-based state-sponsored cyber actors leveraging network vulnerabilities to exploit public and private sector organizations since at least 2020. The widespread intrusion campaigns aim to exploit publicly identified security flaws in network devices such as Small Office/Home Office routers and Network Attached Storage devices with the goal of gaining deeper access to victim networks.
Several US federal agencies today revealed that Chinese-backed threat actors have targeted and compromised major telecommunications companies and network service providers to steal credentials and harvest data. "Upon gaining an initial foothold into a telecommunications organization or network service provider, PRC state-sponsored cyber actors have identified critical users and infrastructure including systems critical to maintaining the security of authentication, authorization, and accounting," the advisory explains.
An "Extremely sophisticated" Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat actor dubbed LuoYu has been observed using a malicious Windows tool called WinDealer that's delivered by means of man-on-the-side attacks. "Such attacks are especially dangerous and devastating because they do not require any interaction with the target to lead to a successful infection."
Check Point found attackers could transmit a specially designed radio packet to a nearby device to crash the firmware, ending that equipment's cellular connectivity, at least, presumably until it's rebooted. UNISOC is a 21-year-old chip designer based in China that spent the first 17 years of life known as Spreadtrum Communications, and that by 2011 was supplying chips for more than half of the mobile phones in the country.
A Chinese-speaking hacking group known as LuoYu is infecting victims WinDealer information stealer malware deployed by switching legitimate app updates with malicious payloads in man-on-the-side attacks. LuoYu has switched to abusing the automatic update mechanism of their victims' apps after previously pushing malware in easier to pull-off watering-hole attacks where they would use compromised local news sites as infection vectors.
An advanced persistent threat actor aligned with Chinese state interests has been observed weaponizing the new zero-day flaw in Microsoft Office to achieve code execution on affected systems. "TA413 CN APT spotted exploiting the Follina zero-day using URLs to deliver ZIP archives which contain Word Documents that use the technique," enterprise security firm Proofpoint said in a tweet.