While McAfee's recently released "Shady RAT" report concentrated on the victims of a mass cyberespionage ring, another researcher has decided to focus his attention on the adversaries behind such attacks. In a video recorded last week at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Joe Stewart of Dell SecureWorks explains how he was able to trace 60 families of custom malware thanks to error messages yielded by a "connection bouncer" tool used by the hackers to hide their tracks, but which inadvertently pointed back to about a dozen command-and-control centers hosted by ISPs in China. Two of the malware families are known to have been used in the RSA SecurID breach. "It gives you a better line on attribution," Stewart told SCMagazineUS.com.
New attacks with the updated SysUpdate toolkit have been deployed by Chinese advanced persistent threat operation Budworm, also known as APT27, Emissary Panda, Bronze Union, Lucky Mouse, Iron Tiger, and Red Phoenix, against an Asian government and a Middle East-based telecommunications provider, reports The Hacker News.
Forty-five malicious NPM and PyPI packages have been deployed by threat actors to facilitate extensive data theft operations as part of a campaign that commenced on Sept. 12, according to BleepingComputer.
Sixty thousand emails from U.S. State Department accounts were noted by a staffer working for Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., to have been exfiltrated by Chinese threat actors during the widespread compromise of Microsoft email accounts that commenced in May, according to Reuters.