Chinese APT Actor Tracked as ‘Antlion’ Targeting Companies in Taiwan

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It has been almost 18 months since the Chinese state-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) actor tracked as ‘Antlion’ has been attacking financial institutions and manufacturing companies in Taiwan state in a persistent campaign. The researchers at Symantec noted that the threat actors deployed a new custom backdoor named ‘xPack’ on compromised networks, which gave malicious actors wide access into the victim’s system.

The backdoor was designed to run WMI commands remotely, while it has also been seen that the attackers leveraged EternalBlue exploits in the backdoor. The attackers also interact with SMB shares, and it is also possible that the actors used mounted shares over SMB to transfer data to the command and control (C2) server. 

Furthermore, the attackers have successfully browsed the web through the backdoor, likely using it as a proxy to mask their IP address. Researchers believe that the malware was used in a campaign against Taiwan and had allowed the adversaries to run stealthy cyber-espionage operations. 

While dissecting such an attack, it could be seen that the malicious actors spent 175 days on the compromised network. However, the Symantec cyberthreat unit is studying two other incidents of such kind to determine how the adversary went undetected on the network for as long as 250 days.