Security News

A newly discovered cyber-espionage group has been hacking governments and high-profile companies in Asia since at least 2020 using a combination of custom and existing malicious tools. The threat group, tracked as Worok by ESET security researchers who first spotted it, has also attacked targets from Africa and the Middle East.

A months-long cyber espionage campaign undertaken by a Chinese nation-state group targeted several entities with reconnaissance malware so as to glean information about its victims and meet its strategic goals. "The targets of this recent campaign spanned Australia, Malaysia, and Europe, as well as entities that operate in the South China Sea," enterprise security firm Proofpoint said in a published in partnership with PwC. Targets encompass local and federal Australian Governmental agencies, Australian news media companies, and global heavy industry manufacturers which conduct maintenance of fleets of wind turbines in the South China Sea.

A suspected Iranian threat activity cluster has been linked to attacks aimed at Israeli shipping, government, energy, and healthcare organizations as part of an espionage-focused campaign that commenced in late 2020. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant is tracking the group under its uncategorized moniker UNC3890, which is believed to conduct operations that align with Iranian interests.

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.

A threat actor is said to have "Highly likely" exploited a security flaw in an outdated Atlassian Confluence server to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor against an unnamed organization in the research and technical services sector. "The evidence indicates that the threat actor executed malicious commands with a parent process of tomcat9.exe in Atlassian's Confluence directory," the company said.

Nation-state hacking groups aligned with China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey have been targeting journalists to conduct espionage and spread malware as part of a series of campaigns since early 2021. "Most commonly, phishing attacks targeting journalists are used for espionage or to gain key insights into the inner workings of another government, company, or other area of state-designated import," Proofpoint said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

A China-based advanced persistent threat group is possibly deploying short-lived ransomware families as a decoy to cover up the true operational and tactical objectives behind its campaigns. The activity cluster, attributed to a hacking group dubbed Bronze Starlight by Secureworks, involves the deployment of post-intrusion ransomware such as LockFile, Atom Silo, Rook, Night Sky, Pandora, and LockBit 2.0.

A state-sponsored Chinese threat actor has used ransomware as a distraction to help it conduct electronic espionage, according to security software vendor Secureworks. Cybersecurity firm Secureworks asserts that ransomware is probably just a distraction from the true intent: cyber espionage.

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.

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.