The China-aligned menace actor often called MirrorFace has been noticed focusing on a diplomatic group within the European Union, marking the primary time the hacking crew has focused an entity within the area.
“During this attack, the threat actor used as a lure the upcoming World Expo, which will be held in 2025 in Osaka, Japan,” ESET stated in its APT Exercise Report for the interval April to September 2024.
“This shows that even considering this new geographic targeting, MirrorFace remains focused on Japan and events related to it.”
MirrorFace, additionally tracked as Earth Kasha, is assessed to be a part of an umbrella group often called APT10, which additionally includes clusters tracked as Earth Tengshe and Bronze Starlight. It is identified for its focusing on of Japanese organizations not less than since 2019, though a brand new marketing campaign noticed in early 2023 expanded its operations to incorporate Taiwan and India.
Through the years, the hacking crew’s malware arsenal has developed to incorporate backdoors resembling ANEL (aka UPPERCUT), LODEINFO and NOOPDOOR (aka HiddenFace), in addition to a credential stealer known as MirrorStealer.
ESET informed The Hacker Information that the MirrorFace assaults are extremely focused, and that it often sees “less than 10 attacks per year.” The top purpose of those intrusions is cyber espionage and information theft. That stated, this isn’t the primary time diplomatic organizations have been focused by the menace actor.
Within the newest assault detected by the Slovak cybersecurity firm, the sufferer was despatched a spear-phishing e-mail containing a hyperlink to a ZIP archive (“The EXPO Exhibition in Japan in 2025.zip”) hosted on Microsoft OneDrive.
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| Picture Supply: Pattern Micro |
The archive file included a Home windows shortcut file (“The EXPO Exhibition in Japan in 2025.docx.lnk”) that, when launched, triggered an an infection sequence that in the end deployed ANEL and NOOPDOOR.
“ANEL disappeared from the scene around the end of 2018 or the start of 2019, and it was believed that LODEINFO had succeeded it, appearing later in 2019,” ESET stated. “Therefore, it is interesting to see ANEL resurfacing after almost five years.”
The event comes as menace actors affiliated with China, like Flax Storm, Granite Storm, and Webworm, have been discovered to be more and more counting on the open-source and multi-platform SoftEther VPN to take care of entry to victims’ networks.
It additionally follows a report from Bloomberg that stated the China-linked Volt Storm breached Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel) as a “test run” as a part of a broader marketing campaign focusing on telecom corporations and different important infrastructure, citing two folks acquainted with the matter. The cyber intrusion was found in June 2024.
Telecommunication and community service suppliers within the U.S. like AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Applied sciences have additionally develop into the goal of one other Chinese language nation-state adversarial collective known as Salt Storm (aka FamousSparrow and GhostEmperor).
Earlier this week, The Wall Avenue Journal stated the hackers leveraged these assaults to compromise cellphone traces utilized by varied senior nationwide safety, coverage officers, and politicians within the U.S. The marketing campaign can also be alleged to have infiltrated communications suppliers belonging to a different nation that “closely shares intelligence with the U.S.”
