APT41 successfully infiltrated and maintained prolonged, unauthorised access to numerous victims' networks over the last year.
Technology, logistics, shipping, and automotive organisations across Asia and Europe have been subjected to malware attacks by Chinese state-sponsored threat operation APT41.
According to research from Google’s Mandiant team, targets in the UK, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Italy, Spain have been subjected to malware attacks by Chinese state-sponsored threat operation APT41 since last year.
Researchers said APT41 successfully infiltrated and maintained prolonged, unauthorised access to numerous victims' networks since 2023, enabling them to extract sensitive data over an extended period.
The attackers deploy a combination of the ANTSWORD and BLUEBEAM web shells for persistence, and the DUSTTRAP dropper which decrypts a malicious payload and executes it in memory, leaving minimal forensic traces.
"The decrypted payload was designed to establish communication channels with either APT41-controlled infrastructure for command and control or, in some instances, with a compromised Google Workspace account, further blending its malicious activities with legitimate traffic," said researchers.
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Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
