 A sophisticated Chinese cyber-attack aimed at stealing UK and European foreign policy data has been tracked by investigators monitoring a global online battlefield. The 'extremely targeted' SmugX campaign is said to have been deployed to hack sensitive information from diplomats and government ministries. One of the baits — known as a 'lure' — designed to dupe targets is a news story about China jailing two human rights lawyers for 'subversion'. The likely state-sponsored campaign uses HMTL smuggling, where 'malicious payloads' are typically hidden inside seemingly innocuous documents and web pages. The attack has been identified as part of a wider shift by Chinese hackers to steal foreign policy data from government IT systems in the UK and Europe. SmugX has been active since at least December 2022 but has been part of the escalated China-originated attacks over the last three months. The graphic shows how France, Hungary, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden and Ukraine have also been targeted, with foreign ministries and embassies in the hackers' sights. The campaign by a Chinese threat actor has been dissected by Check Point Software, a US-Israeli cyber-security company. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The news agency report about the human rights lawyers being jailed was found by the researchers to have been aimed specifically at UK targets as a form of Trojan horse aimed at gaining access to their data. Sergey Shykevich, threat group manager at Check Point Software, told Metro.co.uk that research shows foreign policy has been targeted. 'This attack wasn't widespread, but extremely targeted and sent only to specific targets that the campaign operators wanted to infect with malware,' he said. 'We assess that the informati){kind=link}
NEWS… BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
A sophisticated Chinese cyber-attack aimed at stealing UK and European foreign policy data has been tracked by investigators monitoring a global online battlefield.
The ‘extremely targeted’ SmugX campaign is said to have been deployed to hack sensitive information from diplomats and government ministries.
One of the baits – known as a ‘lure’ – designed to dupe targets is a news story about China jailing two human rights lawyers for ‘subversion’.
The likely state-sponsored campaign uses HMTL smuggling, where ‘malicious payloads’ are typically hidden inside seemingly innocuous documents and web pages.