Chinese APT Hackers Targeting Betting Companies in Southeast Asia

A Chinese-talking highly developed persistent menace (APT) has been connected to a new marketing campaign concentrating on gambling-connected businesses in South East Asia, particularly Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong.

Cybersecurity agency Avast dubbed the marketing campaign Operation Dragon Castling, describing its malware arsenal as a “strong and modular toolset.” The top motives of the menace actor are not instantly discernible as nonetheless nor has it been linked to a known hacking group.

Whilst various first entry avenues were being used throughout the study course of the campaign, a single of the attack vectors concerned leveraging a earlier unknown remote code execution flaw in the WPS Office suite (CVE-2022-24934) to backdoor its targets. The issue has considering that been addressed by Kingsoft Office, the developers of the business program.

In the case observed by the Czech security business, the vulnerability was used to fall a malicious binary from a pretend update server with the domain update.wps[.]cn that triggers a multi-stage infection chain that sales opportunities to the deployment of intermediate payloads the permits for privilege escalation right before finally dropping the Proto8 module.

“The core module is a solitary DLL that is responsible for environment up the malware’s operating directory, loading configuration documents, updating its code, loading plugins, beaconing to [command-and-control] servers and ready for instructions,” Avast scientists Luigino Camastra, Igor Morgenstern, Jan Holman explained.

Proto8’s plugin-based technique applied to prolong its functionality permits the malware to achieve persistence, bypass consumer account manage (UAC) mechanisms, develop new backdoor accounts, and even execute arbitrary commands on the infected program.

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Some parts of this posting are sourced from:
thehackernews.com