PwC security analysts have discovered Chinese APT group KeyBoy back in the wild with new tools and techniques crafted to attack Western organizations.
It’s believed the hacking group is based in China and mainly engage in espionage activity. Historically the group has targeted organizations residing in Taiwan, Tibet, and the Philippines, but the latest campaign shows they are going after mostly Western organizations, likely for corporate espionage reasons.
KeyBoy was found to be using a uniquely crafted Word doc using the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol to download remote payloads. Once the malware is installed, the original DLL is deleted, with popup blocked so the user has no clue what’s happening.
This malware has been designed to take screenshots, gather system information, browse and download files, shutdown & reboot victim machines, and use customer SSL libraries to hide C&C traffic.
The group dates as far back as 2013 when found targeting Southeast Asian victims through malicious Word documents.
The good news for organizations is that there are technologies out there designed to detect abnormal occurrences within systems. File Integrity Monitoring records any changes to the file systems and the systems’ configuration settings. This tool is designed to ensure that a device remains hardened and free of vulnerabilities at all times and that file systems are free of any malware. Meaning that even if some form of APT malware managed to infiltrate a critical server, well-implemented FIM would detect file system changes before any rootkit protective measures that may be employed by the malware can kick in.
Read the article in InfoSecurity Magazine
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