The China-linked superior persistent risk (APT) group generally known as Aquatic Panda has been linked to a “world espionage marketing campaign” that passed off in 2022 focusing on seven organizations.
These entities embrace governments, catholic charities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and assume tanks throughout Taiwan, Hungary, Turkey, Thailand, France, and the US. The exercise, which passed off over a interval of 10 months between January and October 2022, has been codenamed Operation FishMedley by ESET.
“Operators used implants – comparable to ShadowPad, SodaMaster, and Spyder – which might be frequent or unique to China-aligned risk actors,” safety researcher Matthieu Faou stated in an evaluation.
Aquatic Panda, additionally referred to as Bronze College, Charcoal Storm, Earth Lusca, and RedHotel, is a cyber espionage group from China that is recognized to be lively since no less than 2019. The Slovakian cybersecurity firm is monitoring the hacking crew beneath the title FishMonger.
Stated to be working beneath the Winnti Group umbrella (aka APT41, Barium, or Bronze Atlas), the risk actor can be overseen by the Chinese language contractor i-Quickly, a few of whose staff had been charged by the U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) earlier this month for his or her alleged involvement in a number of espionage campaigns from 2016 to 2023.
The adversarial collective has additionally been retroactively attributed to a late 2019 marketing campaign focusing on universities in Hong Kong utilizing ShadowPad and Winnti malware, an intrusion set that was then tied to the Winnti Group.
The 2022 assaults are characterised by way of 5 totally different malware households: A loader named ScatterBee that is used to drop ShadowPad, Spyder, SodaMaster, and RPipeCommander. The precise preliminary entry vector used within the marketing campaign shouldn’t be recognized at this stage.
“APT10 was the primary group recognized to have entry to [SodaMaster] however Operation FishMedley signifies that it could now be shared amongst a number of China-aligned APT teams,” ESET stated.
RPipeCommander is the title given to a beforehand undocumented C++ implant deployed towards an unspecified governmental group in Thailand. It features as a reverse shell that is able to working instructions utilizing cmd.exe and gathering the outputs.
“The group shouldn’t be shy about reusing well-known implants, comparable to ShadowPad or SodaMaster, even lengthy after they’ve been publicly described,” Faou stated.