- Category
- State · Attributed to a state or working for one.
- Origin
- China(high confidence)
- Motivation
- Information theft and espionage
- Seen
- 2019
- Sources
- 5 sources carry it
- Identifier
- GINC-APT-0436 · plushdaemon
What it is
PlushDaemon is a China-aligned APT group that has conducted cyberespionage operations against targets in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, the United States, and New Zealand. They executed a supply chain attack on the South Korean VPN provider IPany, compromising its installer to deploy the SlowStepper backdoor, which features a toolkit of over 30 components. PlushDaemon primarily gains initial access by hijacking legitimate updates of Chinese applications and has also exploited vulnerabilities in legitimate web servers. Additionally, they have utilized the Visual Studio command line utility regcap.exe to side-load a malicious DLL named lregdll.dll.
Attribution
Each attribution is a claim: who makes it, and to whom. Western and Eastern sources are kept apart, as they often disagree.
Western sources
Targets
- Countries
- China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, United States
Tools
The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.
- Backdoor.Oldrea
- China Chopper
- Cyber Eye RAT
- CyberGate
- SlowStepper
- UNITEDRAKE
- Xploit
Sources
- ETDA Threat Group Card apt.etda.or.th
- Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de