Phishing Espionage Attack Targets US-Taiwan Defense Conference

Source: elifbayraktar via Alamy Stock Photo

A meeting of influential figures in and around the US and Taiwanese defense industries has been targeted by a phishing attack carrying fileless malware.

The 23rd US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference will be held next week in Philadelphia’s Logan Square neighborhood. Closed to the press, it will feature speakers from government, defense, academia, and commercial sectors in the US and Taiwan. The focus, according to its website, will be “addressing the future of US defense cooperation with Taiwan, the defense procurement process, and Taiwan’s defense and national security needs.”

Recently, the US-Taiwan Business Council — the organization behind the event — was sent a malicious forgery of its own registration form. The form was paired with information-stealing malware designed to execute entirely in memory, making it more difficult to detect with traditional antivirus software. Thanks to diligent anti-phishing preparations, however, the council quickly rebuffed the attack.

Threats to a Taiwan Defense Conference

Eight years ago, a Chinese phishing email was sent to members of Taiwan’s defense industry, including some attendees of the 15th US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference. Even by then, though, it was old hat.

“In the period from 2003 to 2011, we were heavily targeted with spear-phishing emails constantly,” reports Lotta Danielsson, vice president of the US-Taiwan Business Council. “There was an uptick in 2016-2017, but it has been very quiet for the last several years. Usually, it increases in the leadup to and right after the annual defense conference, then it subsides again.”

In the leadup to this year’s conference, rather than attendees, the attack seemed to target the council itself. It came in an email, from an individual posing as a potential attendee. Rather than use the event’s online form, the impersonator sent a filled out copy of the registration form as a PDF, which attendees can do if they experience technical issues with the site.

Source: Cyble

The document, according to analysis from Cyble, came with a ZIP file that was supposed to drop a malicious Windows shortcut (LNK) file. If opened, the LNK would have established persistence on its targeted machine by placing an executable file in the Windows startup folder. Upon reboot, the executable would download additional payloads to be executed directly in the machine’s memory, without saving any files to disk. Ultimately, the malware could exfiltrate data back to an attacker-controlled server through Web requests designed to blend with normal network traffic.

Cyble researchers were unable to tie the attack to any specific threat actor. They noted, however, that Chinese entities in particular have a long history of targeting Taiwan.

“We’ve seen very clearly in the last few years that there are a lot of problems in East Asian geopolitics — military-related movements in the South China Sea, very sharp comments coming from Taiwan and China. And it looks like nation states are interested in US-Taiwan defense cooperation,” says Kaustubh Medhe, head of research and intelligence for Cyble.

This latest phishing attempt fits neatly into that picture. “We have a strong suspicion that this could be used as a stealthy technique to perform long-term surveillance of people with a specific interest in this particular topic,” he says.

A Textbook Case of How to Prevent Phishing

As Danielsson recalls, “We have been targeted by these types of spear phishing emails for a long time — more than 20 years — so we flagged it as suspicious right away. We did not open the file. Instead, we submitted it to VirusTotal and confirmed that it was malicious. Then we deleted it, and that was pretty much it.”

She highlights a few keys to success that have helped the Council easily swat away its many phishing attacks over the years. “One is educational, so the entire staff is well educated on these types of attacks. Nobody clicks links in emails, or opens documents sent via email, unless we have talked to people directly and are expecting them. Even then, we often scan them before opening, unless the presumed content is very sensitive, in which case we will call people to double-check that they sent them,” she says.

Besides that, she adds, “We keep our email clients text-only so it’s easy to see any obfuscation of links right away. I log all traffic in and out of our system and keep an eye out for anomalies. We also take our entire system offline at night and on weekends, air-gapping our computers and internal IT systems. This is doable because we are a small office with three people, something that might be harder for a larger organization. I also have some relationships with people who work in the cybersecurity industry, and they have helped us think through what to do if we do end up failing to prevent an issue. We want to be prepared if it does.”

About the Author

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes “Malicious Life” – an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify – and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts “The Industrial Security Podcast,” the most popular show in its field.