Since late 2022, Earth Baku has broadened its scope from the Indo-Pacific region to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Their latest operations demonstrate sophisticated techniques, such as exploiting public-facing applications like IIS servers for initial access and deploying the Godzilla webshell for command and control.

• In collaboration with Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), Mandiant has observed a sustained campaign by the advanced persistent threat group APT41 targeting and successfully compromising multiple organizations operating within the global shipping and logistics, media and entertainment, technology, and automotive sectors. The majority of organizations were operating in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
• APT41 successfully infiltrated and maintained prolonged, unauthorized access to numerous victims' networks since 2023, enabling them to extract sensitive data over an extended period.
• APT41 used a combination of ANTSWORD and BLUEBEAM web shells for the execution of DUSTPAN to execute BEACON backdoor for command-and-control communication. Later in the intrusion, APT41 leveraged DUSTTRAP, which would lead to hands-on keyboard activity. APT41 used publicly available tools SQLULDR2 for copying data from databases and PINEGROVE to exfiltrate data to Microsoft OneDrive

Cybereason recently an attack assessed to be the work of Chinese APT Winnti that operated undetected, siphoning intellectual property and sensitive data - the two companion reports examine the tactics and techniques of the overall campaign as well as more detailed analysis of the malware arsenal and exploits used...

The prolific China APT41 hacking group, known for carrying out espionage in parallel with financially motivated operations, has compromised multiple U.S. state government networks, according to cybersecurity giant Mandiant. The group — seemingly undeterred by U.S. indictments against five APT41 members in 2020 — conducted a months-long campaign during which it targeted and successfully breached […]