A Look Into Continuous Efforts By Chinese Hackers to Target Foreign Governments

Phishing is still one of the widely used strategies by cybercriminals and espionage groups to gain an initial foothold on the targeted systems.

Though hacking someone with phishing attacks was easy a decade ago, the evolution of threat detection technologies and cyber awareness among people has slowed down the success of phishing and social engineering attacks over the years.

Since phishing is more sort of a one-time opportunity for hackers before their victims suspect it and likely won’t fall for the same trick again, sophisticated hacking groups have started putting a lot of effort, time and research to design well-crafted phishing campaigns.

In one such latest campaign discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Check Point, a Chinese hacking group, known as Rancor, has been found conducting very targeted and extensive attacks against Southeast Asian government entities from December 2018 to June 2019.

What’s interesting about this ongoing 7-month long campaign is that over this period, the Rancor group has continuously updated tactics, tools, and procedures (TTP) based on its targets in an effort to come up with phishing email contents and lure documents appear being as…