Government and military organizations in the Asia-Pacific region are being targeted by a previously unknown advanced persistent threat (APT) actor, per the latest research conducted by Albert Priego of Group-IB.
Singapore-headquartered Group-IB, in a report shared with The Hacker News, said it’s tracking the ongoing campaign under the name Dark Pink and attributed seven successful attacks to the adversarial collective between June and December 2022.
The bulk of the attacks have singled out military bodies, government ministries and agencies, and religious and non-profit organizations in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, with one unsuccessful intrusion reported against an unnamed European state development body based in Vietnam.
The threat actor is estimated to have commenced its operations way back in mid-2021, although the attacks ramped up only a year later using a never-before-seen custom toolkit designed to plunder valuable information from compromised networks.
“Dark Pink APT’s primary goals are to conduct corporate espionage, steal documents, capture the sound from the microphones of infected devices, and exfiltrate data from messengers,” Group-IB researcher Andrey Polovinkin said, describing the activity as a “highly complex APT campaign launched by seasoned threat actors.”
