Earth Lusca: The Chinese Threat Actor

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 





Introduction

Earth Lusca is also known as AQUATIC PANDA, BRONZE UNIVERSITY, CHROMIUM, Charcoal Typhoon, ControlX, FISHMONGER, Red Dev 10, RedHotel, and TAG-22. It is a Chinese threat actor, that targets the organizations of interest to the Chinese government. 

So far, they have targeted academic institutions, telecommunication companies, religious organizations, and other civil society groups. Its tools closely resembles to those used by Winnti Umbrella. However, it seems the group operates separately. Earth Lusca has also started targeting the cryptocurrency payment platforms and cryptocurrency exchanges in its financially motivated attacks. 

How does Earth Lusca works?

The initial access is achieved via spear phishing and/or watering hole websites. They send emails containing malicious links to their targets. These links are laced with files disguised either as the documents of interest or as opinion forms allegedly coming from another organization. The victim ends up downloading the malicious link file or an executable (leading to a Cobalt Strike loader).

Earth Lusca also uses Watering Holes websites. They are either the compromised websites of a victim or a fake web page copied from a legitimate one, containing a malicious JavaScript code inside them. The links to these websites are sent to their victims. 

Protection

  • Owners of the network edge devices should ensure that management interfaces are not exposed to the public internet to reduce their attack surface.

  • Enforce strong multi-factor authentication (MFA) policies with the help of hardware security keys or Microsoft Authenticator. 

  • Reduce the attack surface by turning on the attack surface reduction rules to block or audit some observed activity associated with this threat.

  • Turn-on cloud-delivered protection in Microsoft Defender Antivirus to cover rapidly evolving attacker tools, techniques, and behaviors.

  • Run Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) in block mode. In this way, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can block malicious artifacts that are detected post-compromise.

Takeaway!

Earth Lusca is a highly skilled and dangerous threat actor motivated by financial gain and cyberespionage. However, it still relies on tried-and-true techniques to entrap a target. Hence, the security best practices can minimize and even stop the impact of an Earth Lusca attack. 

















































Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Query, Visualize, & Monitor Data in Azure Sentinel

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Azure Sentinel Workbooks Several ready for use templates are provided by the Azure Sentinel that can be used to create your own workbook and then modify them as needed for Contoso. Most of the data connectors it uses to ingest data come with their own workbooks, but better insight can be obtained by simply looking into the data that is being ingested by using tables and visualizations, including bar and pie charts. You can also make your own workbook easily by using this data from the beginning instead of using the predefined templates. Workbook Page You can easily access the workbook page from the Azure Sentinel from the navigation pane which consists of the: Workbook header- You can add a new workbook and review the saved workbooks as well as templates that are available on the workbook page. Templates section- You can access existing workbook templates on the Templates tab. You can save some of the workbooks for quick access and they will appear on the My Workbooks tab.  From the
Read more

Work with String Data Using KQL Statements

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Extract Data from Unstructured String Fields Unstructured string fields often contains the Security log data and requires parsing to extract data. There are multiple ways of pulling information from string fields in KQL and the two primary operators used are extract and parse.  Extract It gets a match for a regular expression from a text string. You can convert the extracted substring to the indicated type.  Arguments regex- A regular expression. captureGroup- A positive int constant indicating the capture group to extract. 0 stands for the entire match, 1 for the value matched by the first '('parenthesis')' in the regular expression, 2 or more for subsequent parenthesis.  text- A string to search. typeLiteral- An optional type literal. If provided, the extracted substring is converted to this type.  Returns If regex finds a match in text- the substring matched against the indicated capture group captureGroup, optionally converted to typeLiteral. If there's no mat
Read more

Threat Hunting in Microsoft Sentinel (part 1)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 2, please click  here To read part 3, please click  here Introducing the Microsoft Sentinel Hunting Page Threat hunting is a series activities performed while investigating and as there are no guidelines to perform it, the available tools on the Microsoft Sentinel can be introduced to perform better in your investigations. Firstly, you have to choose the Hunting link in the Microsoft Sentinel navigation menu to get to the Hunting page which is divided into the following sections: The header bar- It is located at the top of the page as usual and contains Refresh as well as timespan drop down menu. The New Query button can help you with creating a new query and the Run all queries button can run all the hunting queries in the background while also updating the hunting query list section with the number of results found.  The summary bar- Here, you can view the total number of queries available to run, the total number of bookmarks, the number of results from running live
Read more