A cyberespionage group linked to China has been spotted targeting government organizations in Taiwan using an Internet Explorer vulnerability patched by Microsoft earlier this year.
Researchers have been monitoring a campaign they’ve dubbed “CNACOM,” in which attackers have used compromised websites to deliver a piece of malware. One of the compromised sites, known as a watering hole, belonged to a major public service organization in Taiwan.
When users accessed this website’s registration page, an iframe injected into the footer loaded an exploit landing page. The Internet Explorer vulnerability leveraged by this exploit, tracked as CVE-2016-0189, was fixed by Microsoft in May, but it had been seen in targeted attacks against users in South Korea before a patch was made available.
A few weeks after Microsoft resolved the flaw, researchers published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. The PoC code was used by cybercriminals to integrate the security hole into several exploit kits.
The same PoC code has been used in the CNACOM campaign, but the payload has been invoked through an Internet Explorer sandbox escape flaw tracked as CVE-2015-0016.
In the CNACOM attacks, the exploit code collects information from the device, including its IP address. If the victim uses Internet Explorer and the IP address is known to belong to the Taiwanese government, the exploit delivers a variant of the malware dubbed Ixeshe.
Ixeshe has been around since at least 2009 and it has been observed in attacks aimed at East Asian governments and electronics manufacturers, including in Taiwan. The malware was also linked to the attacks launched in 2012 against The New York Times.
The group behind Ixeshe, also known as APT12, Numbered Panda and DynCalc, is believed to be operating out of China.
According to Zscaler, the Ixeshe variant spotted in the recent Taiwan attacks is different from older versions as the campaign codes it uses are embedded into the malware, which could indicate that the threat relies on a more centralized tracking system.
Zscaler is not the only security firm to monitor China-linked attacks aimed at Taiwan’s government. Palo Alto Networks and FireEye also reported seeing such attacks in the past few months.
Related: China-Linked Cyberspies Lure Victims With Security Conference Invites
Related: China-Linked APT3 Group Focuses Attacks on Hong Kong
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- Unpatched Security Flaws Expose Water Pump Controllers to Remote Hacker Attacks
- 3CX Confirms Supply Chain Attack as Researchers Uncover Mac Component
- OpenSSL 1.1.1 Nears End of Life: Security Updates Only Until September 2023
- Google Links More iOS, Android Zero-Day Exploits to Spyware Vendors
- ChatGPT Data Breach Confirmed as Security Firm Warns of Vulnerable Component Exploitation
- Thousands Access Fake DDoS-for-Hire Websites Set Up by UK Police
- Intel Boasts Attack Surface Reduction With New 13th Gen Core vPro Platform
- Dole Says Employee Information Compromised in Ransomware Attack
Latest News
- Anti-Bot Software Firm DataDome Banks $42M Financing
- Unpatched Security Flaws Expose Water Pump Controllers to Remote Hacker Attacks
- 500k Impacted by Data Breach at Debt Buyer NCB
- Chinese Cyberspies Use ‘Melofee’ Linux Malware for Stealthy Attacks
- Why Endpoint Resilience Matters
- Microsoft Cloud Vulnerability Led to Bing Search Hijacking, Exposure of Office 365 Data
- 3CX Confirms Supply Chain Attack as Researchers Uncover Mac Component
- UK Introduces Mass Surveillance With Online Safety Bill
