GINC-APT-0212 · State

HURRICANE PANDA

Also Hurricane Panda, Operation “Poisoned Hurricane”.

Category
State · Attributed to a state or working for one.
Origin
China(high confidence)
Motivation
Information theft and espionage
Seen
2013–2014
Status
Dormant
Sources
7 sources carry it
Identifier
GINC-APT-0212 · hurricane-panda

What it is

We have investigated their intrusions since 2013 and have been battling them nonstop over the last year at several large telecommunications and technology companies. The determination of this China-based adversary is truly impressive: they are like a dog with a bone. HURRICANE PANDA's preferred initial vector of compromise and persistence is a China Chopper webshell – a tiny and easily obfuscated 70 byte text file that consists of an ‘eval()’ command, which is then used to provide full command execution and file upload/download capabilities to the attackers. This script is typically uploaded to a web server via a SQL injection or WebDAV vulnerability, which is often trivial to uncover in a company with a large external web presence. Once inside, the adversary immediately moves on to execution of a credential theft tool such as Mimikatz (repacked to avoid AV detection). If they are lucky to have caught an administrator who might be logged into that web server at the time, they will have gained domain administrator credentials and can now roam your network at will via ‘net use’ and ‘wmic’ commands executed through the webshell terminal.

Names

The names each vendor, agency and source gives it. Naming differs by who tracks the actor, so one group carries many.

CrowdStrike
Hurricane Panda
Operations
Operation “Poisoned Hurricane”

Attribution

Each attribution is a claim: who makes it, and to whom. Western and Eastern sources are kept apart, as they often disagree.

Targets

Sectors
Technology, Telecommunications, Telecoms

Tools

The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.

  • China Chopper
  • Mimikatz
  • TINY

Sources