ScarCruft (also called APT37 or Reaper) built a fake online gaming platform in Korean to spread BirdCall, a previously undocumented Android malware aimed at ethnic Koreans living in China. The Record reports the platform impersonated legitimate Korean-language game communities. BirdCall harvests device information, contacts, SMS, call logs, photos, and microphone audio - capabilities consistent with surveillance of diaspora communities rather than financial gain. ScarCruft has historically targeted North Korean defectors and journalists with similar Android malware lures.
Italy extradited Chinese national Xu Zewei to the US on Friday, where he is accused of running a years-long Chinese government-linked spear-phishing campaign that targeted US Covid-19 researchers, universities, and law firms. The case is notable because it's the first time a European country has extradited a Chinese state-linked hacker to the US, and signals tighter coordination between European and US prosecutors on China-attributed cyber operations. Xu was arrested in Milan in July 2024 on a US warrant; Italy's highest court approved the extradition this month after his appeals were exhausted. He could spend decades in US federal prison.
NASA's Office of Inspector General published a retrospective on April 24 detailing how Chinese national Song Wu, an engineer at a state-owned Chinese aerospace and defense conglomerate, ran a multi-year spear-phishing campaign from January 2017 to December 2021. Song impersonated real US engineers known to his targets and asked over email for copies of specific aerospace modeling software and source code that could design or modify weapons platforms. Targets included staff at NASA, US Air Force, Navy, Army, FAA, major universities, and private aerospace firms. Several victims, believing they were helping a friend, sent the requested software - inadvertently violating US export control laws.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence published a detailed report on Storm-1175, a China-based financially motivated group that deploys Medusa ransomware at extreme speed - sometimes moving from initial access to full ransomware deployment within 24 hours. The group exploits internet-facing systems using a mix of zero-day and recently disclosed (n-day) vulnerabilities, having weaponized over 16 flaws across 10 products since 2023. Two vulnerabilities were exploited as zero-days a full week before public disclosure. Recent targets include healthcare, education, finance, and professional services organizations in the US, UK, and Australia. Their playbook: exploit a web-facing flaw, create persistence via new accounts and web shells, steal credentials with Mimikatz, disable Defender via registry modifications, exfiltrate data with Rclone, then deploy Medusa across the network.
Check Point uncovered Operation TrueChaos - a Chinese-nexus espionage campaign that turned a video conferencing platform's update mechanism into a malware delivery system. The attackers compromised a central on-premises TrueConf server used by a government IT department, then swapped the legitimate client update with a weaponized package that deployed the Havoc post-exploitation framework. Every connected government agency pulled the poisoned update automatically, no individual endpoint compromise needed.
TrustStrike Labs