New Delhi, Aug 9 : Chinese hackers targeted military industrial plants as well as research institutes, ministry and state agencies in various countries.They were able even to hijack the infrastructure of IT of certain organizations, taking control of systems that manage security solutions according to a new report disclosed. Researchers from cyber-security company Kaspersky discovered a wave of targeted attacks against military industrial complex companies and public institutions in various Eastern European countries and Afghanistan.
“In the course of our investigation we were able to find more than 12 of the organizations that were targeted,” the researchers said.
It is suggested that “it is highly likely that a Chinese-speaking community has been behind the attack”.
The researchers identified TA428 as a Chinese-speaking APT group that was behind the string of attacks that utilized the six malware backdoors.
The attackers hacked into the enterprise network with carefully crafted phishing messages.
“In the course of our investigation, we found that in certain instances, the attackers design phishing emails using information that isn’t publically accessible, such as the names of the employees responsible for handling sensitive information and the codenames of internal employees of projects created by the targeted organizations,” the team noted.
Phishing emails include Microsoft Word documents with embedded malicious code that exploits the CVE-2017-1882 vulnerability, which allows an attacker to execute any code with no additional user activities.
In the latest series of attacks the attackers employed the backdoors of six different types at the time, which could be used to create multiple communication channels with the infected systems in the event that one of the malicious programs was identified and eliminated by a security program.
“The backdoors that are used provide a wide functionality for controlling the infected system and also for storing confidential information,” said Kaspersky.
The attackers targeted industrial facilities design bureaus, research institutes, as well as government agencies departmental and ministry offices in various East European countries (Belarus, Russia and Ukraine) as and Afghanistan the report added.
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