#chinese malware

[vpnanswers]

Going Phishing Day15 - Identity Quest

Twitter Phishing Hack: In a massive Twitter Inc. phishing-propagated attack, at least 35 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were taken from their holders.

[techrise]

China and India Lock Horns on Cyber Battleground, Each Trying to Outdo the Other

India-China tussle has moved from border clashes to the cyberspace. India remained the top five cyber-attacked countries throughout the year 2020, where almost 50 percent of cyber-attacks were attributed to China alone. Chinese malware attacks were against infrastructure, financial institutions and government agencies, undermining the national security.

China started using its defensive and offensive cyber capabilities as early as 2003. By 2007, it not only penetrated the US and European networks, successfully copying and exporting, but had started carrying out “Byzantine Hades” cyberattacks. It later started targeting India, used malicious software such as Trojans to gain access to sensitive information from the government. In view of China’s nature of exploiting the cyber space for its strategic goals, India, too, is gearing up its cyber capabilities with the help of private actors.

A latest report by a US cyber security and intelligence firm – Recorded Future – revealed that Chinese cyber campaign against India was in action throughout the COVID crisis. Four months after the Indian and Chinese troops clashed in a border battle that took place in the remote Galwan Valley in May 2020, power went out in Mumbai, one of the most crowded Indian cities.

Recorded Future’s threat research arm, Insikt Group determined that a subset of the servers used in the attack shared some common infrastructure tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) with several previously reported Chinese state-sponsored groups – APT41 (aka Barium, Winnti, or Wicked Panda) and Tonto Team. The Chinese malware flowing into the Indian control systems was, hence, linked with the Mumbai grid failure of October 12.

Recorded Future pinned the malware intrusions on RedEcho – a Chinese state-sponsored group. The cyber attack against India’s power grid targeted a total of 12 organisations, 10 of which belonged to the power generation and transmission sector. A power-plant by National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) Limited and New Delhi-based Power System Operation Corporation Limited remained the primary victims.

Meanwhile, India is also suspected to have launched various offensive campaigns to counter such activities against China. Though it is apt to suggest that India is still in the process of building its offensive cyber capabilities, few Indian actors have gained attention for building these capabilities already. For instance, an Indian state-sponsored group called Sidewinder signalled out Chinese military and government entities in spear-phishing attack, post border clashes in May 2020.

Another name that has consistently emerged in spearheading the Indian government’s cyber-offensive strategy is Phronesis. The firm successfully launched a malware attack on Chinese nationals in December 2015 and has continued to develop into a multidimensional cyber consultancy firm.

In 2019, BITTER APT, a suspected Indian APT, was attributed by China-based CERT 360, on indicators of launching targeted attacks on Chinese organisations. This Indian group campaign was believed to have been targeting China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia all along.

Meanwhile, Chinese hackers have unleashed tens of thousands of hacking attempts on India’s technology and banking infrastructure post the border tensions. From knocking the systems offline through denial-of-service attacks to corrupting sites through phishing, Chinese hackers have used almost all modes to target India. They even used Icebug, Hidden Lynx (a professional advanced persistent threat using the program), and APT-12 for attacking government and industrial organisations.

In the latest report, Recorded Future added that most of the Chinese malware was never activated. To examine the details of the cyber intrusion code placed in the strategic power-distribution systems, the firm needed access to India’s power systems.

The consistent cyber activities by both the countries have been pushing grounds for developing a much more aggressive cyber-offensive front in South Asia. The October power outage is a clear example of how malware placement code into infrastructure systems can become the newest form of aggression. It’s a challenging time for India as it is preparing for the next age cyber war, but at the same time, is also exposing itself in a confrontational position amid its ongoing rivalry with China.

[transfin1]

Chinese Cyber Attacks Against India - How Plausible and Formidable?

Hack of power codes, master unknown! A recent NYT report says that Chinese hackers were behind the power outage of Mumbai in October last year. Another report by Reuters says Chinese hackers are breaking repeatedly into SII and Bharat Biotech's servers to hack vaccine data. Many analysts believe this to be a retaliation against the diplomatic and armed deadlock between India and China since the Galwan Valley standoff in March 2020. However, there may be more than one facet to this issue, as you look at it. Delve into the deeper details involved therein and find out why and how China may be playing the long game in light of this development. Click on the link below.

https://transfin.in/chinese-cyber-attacks-against-india-how-plausible-and-formidable

[newsyaari]

US issues alert about malware used by Chinese government

US issues alert about malware used by Chinese government

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WASHINGTON : The US government issued an alert Monday that a type of malware seen frequently by security researchers in the last decade is tied to the Chinese government, the latest in a series of American warnings about China’s cyber capabilities this summer.

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal…

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[knowledgeek03]

US points alert about malware utilized by Chinese authorities

US points alert about malware utilized by Chinese authorities

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WASHINGTON : The US authorities issued an alert Monday {that a} kind of malware seen ceaselessly by safety researchers within the final decade is tied to the Chinese authorities, the most recent in a collection of American warnings about China’s cyber capabilities this summer season.

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security…

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[jansamachar]

'फ़ायरबॉल' चीनी मैलवेयर ने 25 करोड़ कंप्यूटर संक्रमित किए

‘फ़ायरबॉल’ चीनी मैलवेयर ने 25 करोड़ कंप्यूटर संक्रमित किए

नई दिल्ली, 3 जून (जनसमा)| ‘चेक प्वाइंट’ साॅफ्टवेयर टेक्नोलोजिज के शोधकर्ताओं ने एक नया खुलासा किया हे। इसके अनुसार फ़ायरबॉल नाम के एक चीनी मैलवेयर ने दुनिया भ्रर के 25 करोड़ कंप्यूटरों को संक्रमित कर दिया हे। इनमें सर्वाधिक प्रभावित होने वाले देशों में भारत और ब्राजील हैं।

कम्पनी ने ब्लाॅग में लिखा है कि भारत में 25.3 मिलियन  (10.1%), ब्राजील में 24.1 मिलियन (9.6%), मेक्सिको में 16.1 मिलियन (6.4%)…

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[newstfionline]

China police inadvertently admit to buying malware to spy on citizens

By Simon Denyer and Xu Yangjingjing, Washington Post, January 7, 2014

BEIJING--Don’t click on links sent by strangers, the police in one Chinese district warned last year, because malware known as Trojan horses use all sort of tricks to burrow into people’s phones and computers.

“Curiosity hurts,” the Public Security Bureau in the city of Wenzhou in southeastern China posted on its social media account.

Yet a few months after posting that warning, a lower level police department in Wenzhou was left red-faced when it emerged that officers had spent 149,000 yuan ($24,000) buying a device and software designed to plant Trojans into phones to monitor its own citizens.

The embarrassing revelation was spotted on the Web site of the Wenzhou Economic and Development Zone, on a list of purchased items last month. It showed 100,000 yuan spent on a coding machine used “to plant Trojan programs on jail-broken Android or iPhones”, and 49,000 yuan spent on malware targeting the same phones, “to monitor in real time information such as cell phone calls, text messages and photos.”

China’s government insists it staunchly opposes hacking and cyber-attacks, and has denied U.S. government accusations that it spies on foreign companies. State media here has also accused the United States of hypocrisy after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of the NSA’s own cyber-surveillance program.

Reacting to the Wenzhou report, Chinese Web users pointed out Article 286 of the country’s criminal law that threatens up to five years in prison for anyone who “deliberately make and spread disruptive programs such as computer viruses.”

But the revelation did not come as a surprise to citizens here, who live in a culture where surveillance is central to the Party’s effort to “maintain security”--which often means measures to suppress dissent and prolong its rule.

Some sarcastically observed that the fact the information even came out was a step forward.

“The government buys Trojans, and then publicizes it! The government is improving,” one person posted on social media.

Netizens were quick to examine other lists of government purchases and purchase request documents to find embarrassing admissions. The government in Weihai, a city in the the eastern province of Shandong, put out a request document in December 2013 for VPN (virtual private network) software that would allow it to bypass the country’s own censorship apparatus, known as the Great Firewall of China.

The reason for needing to bypass the censors: because they blocked access to social Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, “which is very unhelpful for the Commerce Bureau’s job of soliciting business.”

The government in Taian, also in Shandong, put out a request for a system to identify trending topics online, analyze public opinion and to automatically counter it--in other words to automatically generate pro-government posts on social media to drown out criticism of the authorities.

China is already thought to pay tens of thousands of people to post pro-government comments on Web sites and social media; they are known as the Fifty Cent Party, after the amount of money (0.5 yuan or 8 U.S. cents) they are thought to receive for each post.

Wenzhou’s PSB has since taken down the offending list of purchases from its Web site.

[fileencryption]

South Korean organizations crippled by Chinese malware

Seculert, an Israeli security firm, has recently revealed that over 1,000 computers belonging to many organizations in South Korea have been compromised during a recent attack that was precisely targeted. The attack used as its core a malware called PinkStats that, in the last 4 years, has been mainly used by Chinese speaking groups that [...]

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