Chinese APT Hackers Target Southeast Asian Government Institutions

Cybersecurity researchers today unveiled a complex and targeted espionage attack on potential government sector victims in South East Asia that they believe was carried out by a sophisticated Chinese APT group at least since 2018.

“The attack has a complex and complete arsenal of droppers, backdoors and other tools involving Chinoxy backdoor, PcShare RAT and FunnyDream backdoor binaries, with forensic artefacts pointing towards a sophisticated Chinese actor,” Bitdefender said in a new analysis shared with The Hacker News.

It’s worth noting that the FunnyDream campaign has been previously linked to high-profile government entities in Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, with a majority of victims located in Vietnam.

According to the researchers, not only around 200 machines exhibited attack indicators associated with the campaign, evidence points to the fact the threat actor may have compromised domain controllers on the victim’s network, allowing them to move laterally and potentially gain control of other systems.

The research has yielded little to no clues as to how the infection happened, although it’s suspected that the attackers employed social engineering lures to…