27 Chinese Hackers Profiled

Hacker use information sharing and collaboration, and there is a large community of Chinese coders are doing just that -- exchanging ideas, and tools, and sharing software development. This week, Wapack Labs published a study of 27 of the most active Chinese coders, revealing the some common characteristics of this community:

• These coders are not lone hackers. They are mostly employed in major corporations or network security entities. This includes Alibaba, TenCent, and Huawei, and security entities KnownSec, Keen Team, and Evil Octal.
• They are not anonymous. Real names were found for 18 of the 27 coders studied.
• Many are well known in China and abroad. Several of those studied had more than 400 followers, and one had about 1,800.
• Many are contributing regularly; Several updating ideas and code more than 200 times over a year period.

In addition, the white-hat posture taken by these coders appears to have been accepted so far by the Chinese government. This community does not appear to fear suppression by the government, similar to the shutdown of the Wooyun vulnerability-hunter website earlier this year.

Publication Date: 8 December 2016

Handling Requirements: Traffic light protocol (TLP) AMBER
Attribution/Threat Actors: Criminal or state actors who are organized, highly technical, proficient, well-funded professionals working in teams to discover new vulnerabilities and develop exploits.

Actor Type: Adversary capabilities have been assessed as Tier IV

Industries Targeted: Multi-industry targets/International

Past Reporting: The full reports may be viewed in Red Sky Alliance as DOC-2098, DOC-4350, and comment-7187.  Contact Wapack Labs for more information.  

Malware discovered in Iranian Oil Refineries

www.presstv.ir

On 31 August 2016, Wapack Labs identified open source reporting from Iran that two of their oil refinery operations were recently infected with malicious software.  Iranian officials, who claim, fixed the software problem, deny that the malware was responsible for a series of fires at several petrochemical plants in Iran.  With political instability prevalent in Iran and other Middle East countries, the detection of cyber-attacks and numerous fires could indicate further destabilization.  We are providing this information for your situational awareness.

Publication date:                            31 August 2016

Handling requirements:                  Traffic light protocol (TLP) GREEN

Attribution/Threat Actors:              Malware attack to Iranian oil industry  

Actor Type:                                     Tier III   

Potential Targets:                           Iran

Past Reporting:                               DOC-2816, DOC-2713

The full attribution report has been published in its entirety in the Red Sky Alliance portal.  For more information please contact the lab directly at 844-4-WAPACK, 603-606-1246, or feedback@wapacklabs.com.

About Wapack Labs

Wapack Labs, located in New Boston, NH is a Cyber Threat Analysis and Intelligence organization supporting the Red Sky Alliance, the FS-ISAC and individual organizations by offering expert level targeted intelligence analysis answering some of the hardest questions in Cyber.  Wapack Labs’ engineers, researchers and analysts use deep analysis techniques and visualization to design and deliver transformational cyber-security analysis tools that fuse open source and proprietary information.  The intelligence derived from these tools and techniques serve as the foundation of Wapack Labs’ information reporting to the cyber-security teams of its customers and industry partners located around the world.