A Chinese hacking team has been attributed to a new marketing campaign aimed at infecting authorities officers in Europe, the Center East, and South The us with a modular malware regarded as PlugX.
Cybersecurity agency Secureworks claimed it identified the intrusions in June and July 2022, when all over again demonstrating the adversary’s continued concentrate on espionage in opposition to governments close to the environment.
“PlugX is modular malware that contacts a command and management (C2) server for tasking and can obtain added plugins to enrich its ability past basic details accumulating,” Secureworks Counter Risk Device (CTU) said in a report shared with The Hacker Information.
Bronze President is a China-primarily based menace actor energetic considering that at minimum July 2018 and is possible estimated to be a point out-sponsored team that leverages a mix of proprietary and publicly out there equipment to compromise and gather facts from its targets.
It is really also publicly documented underneath other names these kinds of as HoneyMyte, Mustang Panda, Red Lich, and Temp.Hex. One particular of its major tools of decision is PlugX, a remote obtain trojan that has been broadly shared amid Chinese adversarial collectives.
Before this yr, the team was observed targeting Russian authorities officials with an current model of the PlugX backdoor termed Hodur, alongside entities situated in Asia, the European Union, and the U.S.
Secureworks’ attribution of the newest marketing campaign to Bronze President stems from the use of PlugX and politically-themed lure paperwork that align with regions that are of strategic worth to China.
Attack chains distribute RAR archive documents that consist of a Windows shortcut (.LNK) file masquerading as a PDF doc, opening which executes a genuine file current in a nested concealed folder embedded inside the archive.
This then paves the way for dropping a decoy document, while the PlugX payload sets up persistence on the infected host.
“BRONZE PRESIDENT has shown an potential to pivot immediately for new intelligence collection possibilities,” the researchers mentioned. “Corporations in geographic locations of interest to China should really closely keep an eye on this group’s activities, in particular organizations linked with or working as govt agencies.”
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thehackernews.com