Chinese-linked cyber espionage group re-emerges

The cyber espionage group known as Codoso (or C0d0So0), which has links with China, has re-emerged. The group has been active since 2010, but disappeared for several months. Historically, it has focused its operations on the defence, energy, government, and financial sectors, as well as targeting think-tanks and political dissidents. Its attacks are notably sophisticated, and among its most high-profile hacks have been the news site Forbes.com and breaching the network of Samsung subsidiary, LoopPay. A new wave of attacks, attributed to Codoso, have targeted organisations in the education, legal services, manufacturing, and telecommunications sectors, but researchers suspect it is currently gathering intelligence for use in a much larger attack. Typically, the group has leveraged spear phishing emails, and deployed malware to compromised legitimate websites via watering hole attacks.

Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks are reporting on increased activity from the Chinese-linked cyber-espionage group that previously hacked Forbes.com and later Samsung Pay.

The group, known as C0d0s0, or simply as Codoso, does not seem to have a clear direction and purpose for this most recent campaign and appears to be harvesting information on random Internet users, probably building a database of possible pawns for future attacks.

Just as before, the group is employing some of the most sophisticated attack methods seen around, deploying malware through compromised but legitimate websites, via watering hole techniques.

There were also cases where spear-phishing emails were used against targets in the telecommunications, high tech, education, manufacturing, and legal services industries.

In all cases, the malware chosen for Codoso's attacks was a new variant of the Derusbi family, also utilized by other Chinese cyber-espionage groups.

This malware works by using DLL side-loading techniques to inject malicious content in legitimate applications. This allows it to avoid some security tools and alter registry keys to gain boot persistence.

Group seems to be interested in collecting data on random Internet users

Once in action, the malware will collect data about targets and send it to a remote C&C server. Palo Alto detected three servers used in the most recent wave of Codoso attacks, all with connections between them and registered in Hong Kong.

The group is collecting data about users, like their IP address, their MAC address, username, hostname, CPU details, and Internet Explorer user agent string.

Palo Alto researchers suspect this may be the incipient stage of a more dangerous attack to come.

"The tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by C0d0so0 appear to be more sophisticated than many other adversary groups with multiple layers of obfuscation in use, as well as specific victim targeting in what appears to be an attempt at creating a staging area for additional attack," Palo Alto researchers Josh Grunzweig and Bryan Lee said about the group. We'll now have to wait and see what the group is really after this time around.