TAIPEI: Chinese hackers target telecoms companies worldwide: Report

TAIPEI: A hacking group, believed to be
working out of China, is reportedly targeting telecom companies around the
world in a bid to steal 5G technology secrets, among other sensitive
information.

Telecommunications providers in Southeast Asia, Europe and the US are being targeted
as part of the campaign uncovered by researchers at cybersecurity company
McAfee, ZDNet reported.

The campaign has believed to have targeted at least 23 telecommunications
companies.
However, it is not clear how many of these targeted companies have actually
been compromised.
The group behind the campaign is dubbed Operation Dianxun.

The tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used in the attack are like those
observed in earlier campaigns publicly attributed to the threat actors RedDelta
and Mustang Panda.
Most probably this threat is targeting people working in the telecommunications
industry and has been used for espionage purposes to access sensitive data and
to spy on companies related to 5G technology, McAfee said in a blog post.

While the initial vector for the infection is not entirely clear, the McAfee
cybersecurity team believes that victims were lured to a domain under control
of the threat actor, from which they were infected with malware which the
threat actor leveraged to perform additional discovery and data collection.

“It is our belief that the attackers used a phishing website masquerading
as the Huawei company career page,” explained McAfee regional solutions
architect, Andrea Rossini.
However, Huawei itself is not involved in the cyber-espionage campaign,
according to the researchers.