Infosec outfit Cybereason says it's discovered a multi-year – and very successful – Chinese effort to steal intellectual property.
The company has named the campaign "Operation CuckooBees" and attributed it, with a high degree of confidence, to a Beijing-backed advanced persistent threat-slinger going by Winnti – aka APT 41, BARIUM, and Blackfly.
Whatever the group is called, it uses several strains of malware and is happy to construct complex chains of activity. In the attack Cybereason claims to have spotted, Winnti starts by finding what Cybereason has described as "a popular ERP solution" that had "multiple vulnerabilities, some known and some that were unknown at the time of the exploitation."
Once ERP was compromised, Winnti sought out a file named gthread-3.6.dll, which can be found in the VMware Tools folder. The DLL was used to inject other payloads into svchost.exe, with installation of a webshell and credential dumping tools high on the crims' to-do list.
Cybereason's technical deep dive into Winnti's techniques details many efforts to hide its activities.
Among the crew's techniques employs the Common Log File System (CLFS) present in Windows Server, as it uses an undocumented file format that can be accessed through APIs but can't be parsed. That makes CLFS data a fine place to hide payloads. Cybereason says Winnti did so, and was able to evade detection for years – the firm suggests Operation CuckooBees commenced in 2019 and went undetected until 2021, thanks largely to its use of CLFS and other sophisticated techniques to hide.
"With years to surreptitiously conduct reconnaissance and identify valuable data, it is estimated that the group managed to exfiltrate hundreds ..
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