Category Archives: Taiwan

Suspected Chinese hackers target telecom research in Taiwan, Recorded Future says

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A suspected Chinese state-sponsored group is targeting telecommunications organizations in Taiwan, Nepal and the Philippines, researchers at Recorded Future’s Insikt Group said in a report Thursday. Researchers noticed intrusions from the group, which investigators called TAG-22, in June targeting telecommunications organizations including the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan, Nepal Telecom and the Department of Information and Communications Technology in the Philippines. Some of the activity appears to be ongoing as of press time, researchers said. The new findings play into a larger backdrop of apparent Chinese hackers snooping on global competition in the telecommunications space, which has become an arena of political and economic conflict between China and the United States. “In particular, the targeting of the ITRI is notable due to its role as a technology research and development institution that has set up and incubated multiple Taiwanese technology firms,” researchers wrote. They noted that the organization is […]

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McDonald’s discloses hack of customer data in South Korea and Taiwan

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Hackers recently breached the IT systems of McDonald’s and accessed email addresses, phone numbers and delivery addresses for certain customers in South Korea and Taiwan, the fast food giant said Friday. “In the coming days, a few additional markets will take steps to address files that contained employee personal data,” McDonald’s said in an emailed statement. The burger chain said it quickly identified and contained the breach, which involved a “small number of files.” No customer payment information was affected, according to McDonald’s. The breach also involved business contact information of U.S. employees and franchisees, the Wall Street Journal reported. In some cases, the intruders also accessed data about restaurant seating capacity and the square footage of play areas, the Journal reported. It was unclear who was responsible for the hack. A McDonald’s spokesperson did not respond to an emailed question on who the culprit might be. McDonald’s, which reported […]

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Spies target gamers with malware inserted into software updates, ESET says

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Gamers are familiar targets for hackers, but those operations often are broadly aimed at stealing data, installing nuisances like adware or disrupting the games themselves. Sometimes, though, attackers have other things in mind. A malware operation in Asia appears to be “highly targeted” toward spying on only a handful of users of a popular piece of gaming software, according to cybersecurity researchers at Slovakia-based ESET. The attackers compromised the update mechanism for NoxPlayer, an emulator program that allows Android games to be played on PCs and Macs, ESET says. It’s a supply-chain attack, not unlike others with much bigger footprints and much larger geopolitical effects. The perpetrators appear to have broken into infrastructure at Hong Kong-based BigNox, which makes NoxPlayer, to add the malware to the updates that go to customers. The details get fuzzy from there. About 150 million people, mostly in Asia, use NoxPlayer. ESET says it discovered […]

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Vincent Callebaut’s stunning twisting tower finally nears completion

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Some four years after it was originally due to be completed, and over a decade after first being commissioned, Vincent Callebaut’s twisting Tao Zhu Yin Yuan (aka Agora Garden Tower) in Taipei, Taiwan, is finally nearing completion – and it’s looking li… Continue reading Vincent Callebaut’s stunning twisting tower finally nears completion→

Taiwan accuses Chinese hackers of aggressive attacks on government agencies

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The Taiwanese government on Wednesday accused Chinese government-linked hackers of targeting 10 Taiwanese government agencies and 6,000 email accounts of officials in an escalation of Beijing’s long-running espionage on the island. Over the course of two years, Chinese hackers have infiltrated a variety of Taiwanese government offices in an effort to steal sensitive documents, Liu Chia-zung, an official in the Taiwan Investigation Bureau’s Cyber Security Investigation Office, said at a press conference. Liu conceded that with the breach of key IT infrastructure, at least some data may have been exposed. It is only the latest in a wave of suspected Chinese hacking campaigns to hit Taiwan, which China considers its territory. The Taiwanese semiconductor industry, a centerpiece of the global supply chain for smartphones, has also come under sustained assault from hackers that appear to be based in China, private researchers said earlier this month. And in May, Taiwan suggested that a broad […]

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Hacking group has hit Taiwan’s prized semiconductor industry, Taiwanese firm says

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Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, a centerpiece of the global supply chain for smartphones and computing equipment, was the focus of a hacking campaign targeting corporate data over the last two years, Taiwan-based security firm CyCraft Technology claimed Thursday. The hackers went after at least seven vendors in the semiconductor industry in 2018 and 2019, quietly scouring networks for source code and chip-related software, CyCraft said. Analysts say the campaign, which reportedly hit a sprawling campus of computing firms in northwest Taiwan, shows how the tech sector’s most prized data is sought out by well-resourced hacking groups. “They’re choosing the victims very precisely,” C.K. Chen, senior researcher at CyCraft, said of the hackers. “They attack the top vendor in a market segment, and then attack their subsidiaries, their competitors, their partners and their supply chain vendors.” It was unclear which companies were targeted; CyCraft declined to name them. It was also unclear who was responsible for the […]

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DOD, FBI, DHS release info on malware used in Chinese government-led hacking campaigns

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The U.S. government publicly put forth information Monday that exposed malware used in Chinese government hacking efforts for more than a decade. The Chinese government has been using malware, referred to as Taidoor, to target government agencies, entities in the private sector, and think tanks since 2008, according to a joint announcement from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Defense, and the FBI. The Chinese Communist Party has been using the malware, in conjunction with proxy servers, “to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation,” according to the U.S. government’s malware analysis report (MAR). In particular, Taidoor has been used to target government and private sector organizations that have a focus on Taiwan, according to previous FireEye analysis. It is typically distributed to victims through spearphishing emails that contain malicious attachments. U.S. Cyber Command, the DOD’s offensive cyber unit, has also shared samples […]

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‘Vendetta’ hackers are posing as Taiwan’s CDC in data-theft campaign

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A mysterious hacking group has been posing as Taiwan’s top infection-disease official in an attempt to steal sensitive data from Taiwanese users, researchers said Monday. The hackers sent meticulously written spearphishing emails to a select group of targets, which may have included Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control employees, according to ElevenPaths, the cybersecurity unit of Spanish telecommunications firm Telefónica Group, which uncovered the activity. It’s a reminder of the lengths to which hacking groups have gone to impersonate public health authorities and break into computer networks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of a week in early May, the hackers sent emails to certain Taiwanese users urging them to get novel coronavirus tests. Attached to the email was a remote hacking tool capable of stealing login credentials and hijacking webcams. “The type of tools and the targets selected indicate that they are looking for intelligence, mainly governmental,” Miguel Ángel […]

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Taiwan suggests China’s Winnti group is behind ransomware attack on state oil company

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Taiwanese authorities have suggested that Chinese hackers were behind a ransomware attack against Taiwan’s state oil company, an aggressive assault on one of the island nation’s strategic assets. Data left behind in the attack, such as a configuration file and domain name, point to the involvement of a group known as Winnti, Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice said in a statement Friday. Winnti is a broad collection of hackers that cybersecurity researchers have linked with the Chinese government. Cybersecurity analysts say Beijing’s hackers have long conducted operations against Taiwanese targets to gather intelligence. But an attempt to extort Taiwanese company CPC Corp., which is responsible for delivering oil products throughout Taiwan, would be a much more brazen move. Although the attack didn’t affect the CPC’s energy production, it did disrupt some customers’ efforts to use CPC Corp.’s payment cards to purchase gas. CyberScoop could not independently confirm that Winnti was involved in the attack. The Chinese Embassy in Washington, […]

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