A cyber espionage group has targeted several South Korean think tanks, as well as a smaller number of entities in China, to deliver a data-stealing trojan.
According to Dmitry Tarakanov, a Kaspersky researcher who blogged about the threat on Wednesday, this particular campaign is standout due to the fact that the malware's command hub communicates with a Bulgarian email server, and the trojan's authors used Korean hieroglyphs to code the malware.
At least 11 organizations in South Korea were targeted, as well as two in China, Kaspersky found.
The trojan named “Kimsuky” has keylogging capabilities and collects other sensitive data like directory listing information and Word documents on machines. Due to IP addresses and email accounts used in the attacks, researchers believe the group has ties to North Korea.
