According to the detailed report recently released by the California-based cybersecurity company, during September 2021, Resecurity notified several data center organizations about malicious cyber activity targeting them and their customers. Such organizations act as a critical part of the enterprise supply chain and become a juicy target for nation-state, criminal and cyberespionage groups.
The details about this activity have been shared with the affected parties and national computer emergency response teams in China and Singapore respectfully for further analysis and risk mitigation. Further updates received during 2022 and in January 2023 have also been shared with U.S. Law Enforcement due to the significant presence of major Fortune 500 corporations in the observed data sets. Some of these organizations are current customers of Resecurity and were notified at the earliest stage of the campaign development. Many of them interpreted it as a significant risk to their supply chain and initiated further incident response.
In one of the cases reported to CNCERT/CC, it’s likely the initial access was gained via a vulnerable helpdesk module having integration with other applications and systems, this could allow to perform lateral movement in one of the observed episodes. The actor was able to extract a list of CCTV cameras with associated video stream identifiers presumably used to monitor data center environments, as well as credential information related to operators (IT staff at the data center) and customers.
Once the customer credentials were collected, the actor performed active probing to the customer panels aiming to collect information about the representatives of enterprise customers who manage operations at the data center, list of purchased services, and deployed equipment. During the 1st episode of the identified campaign, the actor was also able to collect cellphone and ID card numbers, likely to be used for certain client verifications. After communication with CNCERT around January 24, 2023, the affected organization forced customers to change their passwords. During the 2nd episode of the same campaign, the actor was able to exfiltrate similar records from another data center organization having meaningful footprint in APAC.