Collaborate Disseminate
Scammers are stealing money from children, with the alluring but bogus promise that China’s tough restrictions on online gaming can be subverted.
Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog. Continue reading Chinese criminals scam kids desperate to play games for more than three hours a week
Security researchers believe a newly discovered variant of mobile malware, dubbed xRAT, represents the latest iteration of a sophisticated cyber-espionage tool previously used by the Chinese government against dissidents, according to evidence published by cybersecurity firm LookOut. The first sample of xRAT appeared in April, said Michael Flossman, a security researcher with LookOut, and since then more than 60 unique samples belonging to this same remote access trojan family have been found. RAT is short for remote access trojan, a kind of malicious software program that installs a back door on a device so the attacker can take administrative control. “Initially when we started investigating [xRAT] our attribution suggested the actor behind it was likely Chinese, due to a combination of comments in the code, the types of apps being trojanized, and the location and whois details of command and control infrastructure,” explained Flossman. “Further analysis revealed a strong connection to […]
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Think of it as hiding in plain sight. Ninety-nine percent of Chinese cybercriminals communicate over instant messenger apps like QQ and WeChat, according to research from the cybersecurity firm Flashpoint. Both apps are wildly popular in China and almost nowhere else. The apps, which are both owned and operated by the multibillion-dollar Chinese tech giant Tencent, cooperate directly and extensively with expansive government censorship and surveillance. To the outside, it would seem to be a barren and dangerous environment for coordinating criminal enterprises. That doesn’t stop the hackers, though. “You would imagine that people who are engaging in illicit activities would at least make an effort to use a platform that’s not explicitly monitored by the regime, right?” says Jon Condra, Flashpoint’s Director of East Asian Research and Analysis. To beat government surveillance, China’s cybercriminal underground deploy technical, typographic and linguistic tricks that can make tracking them increasingly difficult. In Russia, by stark contrast, Jabber reigns as the messenger […]
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