APT27 aka Budworm APT and Lucky Mouse

Updated on 2022-12-01

Have some LuckyMouse APT TTPs, courtesy of Sekoia. Read more: Lucky Mouse: Incident Response to Detection Engineering

Updated on 2022-10-24: APT27 intrusion

French security firm INTRINSEC published a step-by-step technical breakdown of an APT27 (LuckyMouse, EmissaryPanda) intrusion, during which the Chinese espionage group breached a network, lay in hiding for 11 months, and stole 3TB of data from their victim over the span of 17 days. Read more: APT27 – One Year To Exfiltrate Them All: Intrusion In-Depth Analysis

Updated on 2022-10-14: Budworm

Broadcom’s Symantec Threat Hunter Team said it spotted new attacks from the Budworm APT (also known as APT27 and Lucky Mouse), including attacks on US entities, which Symantec said the group hasn’t targeted in years. Read more: Budworm: Espionage Group Returns to Targeting U.S. Organizations

“The Budworm espionage group has mounted attacks over the past six months against a number of strategically significant targets, including the government of a Middle Eastern country, a multinational electronics manufacturer, and a US state legislature. The latter attack is the first time in a number of years Symantec has seen Budworm targeting a U.S-based entity. Along with the above high-value targets, the group also conducted an attack against a hospital in South East Asia.”

Updated on 2022-10-13

China-linked APT27 was found targeting a U.S. state legislature with HyperBro backdoor, PlugX, Cobalt Strike, Fscan, and other tools. Read more: Budworm: Espionage Group Returns to Targeting U.S. Organizations

Updated on 2022-10-12: Symantec: Cyberespionage Actors with Ties to China Exploited Log4j Vulnerabilities to Gain Access to Networks

Researchers at Symantec have published a report detailing a cyber espionage campaign that has targeted the government of a Middle Eastern company, a multinational electronics manufacturer, and a US State Legislature. The hacking group, which Symantec calls Budworm, is believed to have ties to China’s government. Symantec notes that “In recent attacks, Budworm leveraged the Log4j vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45105) to compromise the Apache Tomcat service on servers in order to install web shells. The attackers used Virtual Private Servers (VPS) hosted on Vultr and Telstra as command-and-control (C&C) servers.”

Note

• The Symantec blog includes IoC’s you can incorporate into your system to find components of this attack, preferably before any damage is done. Review the CISA aa22-277a bulletin (https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/alerts/aa22-277a) for MITRE ATT&CK techniques. CISA’s mitigations are not new ideas; they include network segmentation based on function, managing vulnerabilities and configurations, leveraging segmentation, anomalous behavior detection, and restricting use of remote administration tools.

Read more in

• Budworm: Espionage Group Returns to Targeting U.S. Organizations
• Chinese-linked hackers targeted U.S. state legislature, researchers say
• Budworm Hackers Resurface with New Espionage Attacks Aimed at U.S. Organization
• U.S. state legislature, Middle Eastern gov’t targeted by espionage group through Log4j

Pelosi’s Taiwan visit and the cyberattacks

In a report last week, security firm Trellix linked several of the cyberattacks that hit Taiwanese government systems ahead of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to several Chinese hacktivist groups—even the ones from a group claiming to be “APT27.” Read more: Cyber Tools and Foreign Policy: A False Flag Chinese “APT” and Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan

While the hacktivist group APT27_Attack claimed responsibility for these DDoS attacks, this hacktivist group is unlikely the same group as the APT27 espionage group known as Emissary Panda. The group’s Twitter post claiming to be “APT27” is therefore a false flag, which successfully misled most major news agencies in their news reports.