A Decade-Long Chinese Espionage Campaign Targets Southeast Asia and Australia & More News Here

A beforehand undocumented Chinese-speaking superior persistent risk (APT) actor dubbed Aoqin Dragon has been linked to a string of espionage-oriented assaults geared toward authorities, training, and telecom entities mainly in Southeast Asia and Australia courting way back to 2013.

“Aoqin Dragon seeks initial access primarily through document exploits and the use of fake removable devices,” SentinelOne researcher Joey Chen mentioned in a report shared with The Hacker News. “Other techniques the attacker has been observed using include DLL hijacking, Themida-packed files, and DNS tunneling to evade post-compromise detection.”

The group is alleged to have some stage of tactical affiliation with one other risk actor often known as Naikon (aka Override Panda), with the campaigns primarily directed towards targets in Australia, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Infections chains mounted by Aoqin Dragon have banked on Asia-Pacific political affairs and pornographic-themed doc lures in addition to USB shortcut methods to set off the deployment of one in all two backdoors: Mongall and a modified model of the open-source Heyoka undertaking.

Up till 2015, this concerned leveraging exploits for previous and unpatched safety vulnerabilities (CVE-2012-0158 and CVE-2010-3333) within the decoy paperwork that had been designed to entice targets into opening them. Over the years, the risk actor has advanced its strategy to make use of executable droppers masquerading as antivirus software program from McAfee and Bkav to deploy the implant and hook up with a distant server.

“Although executable files with fake file icons have been in use by a variety of actors, it remains an effective tool especially for APT targets,” Chen defined. “Combined with ‘interesting’ email content and a catchy file name, users can be socially engineered into clicking on the file.”

That mentioned, Aoqin Dragon’s latest preliminary entry vector of alternative since 2018 has been its use of a pretend detachable system shortcut file (.LNK), which , when clicked, runs an executable (“RemovableDisc.exe”) masked with the icon for the favored note-taking app Evernote however is engineered to perform as a loader for 2 completely different payloads.

One of the elements within the an infection chain is a spreader that copies all malicious recordsdata to different detachable units and the second module is an encrypted backdoor that injects itself into rundll32’s reminiscence, a local Windows course of used to load and run DLL recordsdata.

Known for use since no less than 2013, Mongall (“HJ-client.dll”) is described as a not-so “particularly feature rich” implant however one which packs sufficient options to create a distant shell and add and obtain arbitrary recordsdata to and from the attacker-control server.

Also utilized by the adversary is a reworked variant of Heyoka (“srvdll.dll”), a proof-of-concept (PoC) exfiltration instrument “which uses spoofed DNS requests to create a bidirectional tunnel.” The modified Heyoka backdoor is extra highly effective, geared up with capabilities to create, delete, and seek for recordsdata, create and terminate processes, and collect course of data on a compromised host.

“Aoqin Dragon is an active cyber espionage group that has been operating for nearly a decade,” Chen mentioned, including, “it is likely they will also continue to advance their tradecraft, finding new methods of evading detection and stay longer in their target network.”

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