- Category
- Targeted, sponsor unknown · Targeted intrusions with no sponsor attributed.
- Origin
- China(high confidence)
- Sources
- 6 sources carry it
- Identifier
- GINC-APT-0336 · red-menshen
What it is
Since 2021, Red Menshen, a China based threat actor, which has been observed targeting telecommunications providers across the Middle East and Asia, as well as entities in the government, education, and logistics sectors using a custom backdoor referred as BPFDoor. This threat actor uses a variety of tools in its post-exploitation phase. This includes custom variants of the shared tool Mangzamel (including Golang variants), custom variants of Gh0st, and open source tools like Mimikatz and Metasploit to aid in its lateral movement across Windows systems. Also, They have been seen sending commands to BPFDoor victims via Virtual Privat Servers (VPSs) hosted at a well-known provider, and that these VPSs, in turn, are administered via compromised routers based in Taiwan, which the threat actor uses as VPN tunnels. Most Red Menshen activity that has been observed took place between Monday to Friday (with none observed on the weekends), with most communication taking place between 01:00 and 10:00 UTC.131 This pattern suggests a consistent 8 to 9-hour activity window for the threat actor, with realistic probability of it aligning to local working hours.
Names
The names each vendor, agency and source gives it. Naming differs by who tracks the actor, so one group carries many.
- PwC
- Red Dev 18
- Trend Micro
- Earth Bluecrow
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
- Asia, Middle East
- Sectors
- Education, Government, Logistics
Tools
The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.
- Backdoor.Oldrea
- China Chopper
- CrossRat
- Gh0st RAT
- Windows Remote Desktop
- Xploit
- gh0st
Sources
- Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de