Study of Chinese hackers is dangled as phishing bait - pepperhisday

Attackers are using fake versions of a recently released report about a Chinese cyberespionage group as bait in new spear-phishing attacks that target Japanese and Formosan users.

The report was released Tuesday by surety firm Mandiant and documents in great detail the cyberespionage campaigns conducted since 2006 by a cyber-terrorist chemical group known as the Comment Crew against more than 100 companies and organizations from different industries.

Mandiant refers to the group as APT1 (Late Persistent Menace 1) and claims in the cover that information technology's likely a orphic Shanghai-based cyberespionage unit of the Chinese Army—the People's Liberation USA (PLA)—code-named "Unit 61398."

The Chinese government has dismissed Mandiant's claims A groundless. However, the write up received very much of attention from mass in the IT security industry, as well As from the overall public.

It seems that this publicity has now led to attackers deciding to use the written report as bait in new targeted attacks.

Malware masquerades as Mandiant report

Two opposite spear-phishing attacks were discovered last week using emails with malicious attachments that masqueraded as the Mandiant report, said Aviv Raff, the gaffer technology officer of security firm Seculert.

Indefinite attack targeted Japanese-public speaking users and tangled emails with an adherence called Mandiant.pdf. This PDF file exploits a vulnerability in Adobe Reader that was patched away Adobe in an emergency update Wednesday, security department researchers from Seculert said in a blog post.

The malware installed by the exploit connects to a command-and-control waiter hosted in Korea, only also contacts much Japanese websites, probably in an attempt to trick security products, the Seculert researchers said.

Symantec has also detected and analyzed the spear-phishing attack. "The email purports to be from someone in the media recommending the report," Symantec researcher Joji Hamada said in a web log post. However, IT would be evident for a Asian country person that the email was not written by a native Japanese speaker unit, helium same.

Hamada pointed out that similar tactics have been used in the past. In one incident back in 2022, hackers used a explore paper some targeted attacks published by Symantec as bait. "They did this by spamming targets with the actual whitepaper along with malware invisible in an file away attachment," Hamada said.

Exploits old Adobe brick flaw

The forward spear-phishing attack detected targets Chinese-speaking users and uses a malicious attachment named "Mandiant_APT2_Report.pdf."

According to an analysis of the PDF file past researcher Brandon Dixon of security consultancy fixed 9b+, the document exploits an older Adobe Reviewer exposure that was discovered and patched in 2022.

The malware installed happening the system of rules establishes a connection to a domain that currently points to a server in China, Dixon said via netmail. "The malware provides attackers with the ability to execute commands along the victim's organisation."

The domain name contacted by this malware was also utilised in the past in attacks that targeted Tibetan activists, Seculert's Raff said. Those older attacks installed some Windows and Mac Operating system X malware, he said.

Greg Walton, a investigator from MalwareLab, a security outfit that tracks politically motivated malware attacks, said along Twitter that the Mandiant-themed shaft-phishing attack targeted journalists in China. This information could not be habitual by Raff or Dixon, WHO said that they don't have copies of the original spam emails, only of the malicious attachment they contained.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/456945/study-of-chinese-hackers-is-dangled-as-phishing-bait.html

Posted by: pepperhisday.blogspot.com

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