A suspected advanced persistent threat (APT) originating from China targeted a government organization in Taiwan, and possibly other countries in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, by exploiting a recently patched critical security flaw impacting OSGeo GeoServer GeoTools.
The intrusion activity, which was detected by Trend Micro in July 2024, has been attributed to a threat actor dubbed Earth Baxia.
“Based on the collected phishing emails, decoy documents, and observations from incidents, it appears that the targets are primarily government agencies, telecommunication businesses, and the energy industry in the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Thailand,” researchers Ted Lee, Cyris Tseng, Pierre Lee, Sunny Lu, and Philip Chen said.
The discovery of lure documents in Simplified Chinese points to China being one of the affected countries as well, although the cybersecurity company said it does not have enough information to determine what sectors within the country have been singled out.
The multi-stage infection chain process leverages two different techniques, using spear-phishing emails and the exploitation of the GeoServer flaw (CVE-2024-36401, CVSS score: 9.8), to ultimately deliver Cobalt Strike and a previously unknown backdoor codenamed EAGLEDOOR, which allows for information gathering and payload delivery.
“The threat actor employs GrimResource and AppDomainManager injection to deploy additional payloads, aiming to lower the victim’s guard,” the researchers noted, adding the former method is used to download next-stage malware via a decoy MSC file dubbed RIPCOY embedded within a ZIP archive attachment.
It’s worth mentioning here that Japanese cybersecurity company NTT Security Holdings recently detailed an activity cluster with links to APT41 that it said used the same two techniques to target Taiwan, the Philippines military, and Vietnamese energy organizations.
It’s likely that these two intrusion sets are related, given the overlapping use of Cobalt Strike command-and-control (C2) domains that mimic Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure (e.g., “s3cloud-azure,” “s2cloud-amazon,” “s3bucket-azure,” and “s3cloud-azure”), and Trend Micro itself (“trendmicrotech”).
The end goal of the attacks is to deploy a custom variant of Cobalt Strike, which acts as a launchpad for the EAGLEDOOR backdoor (“Eagle.dll”) via DLL side-loading.
The malware supports four methods to communicate with the C2 server over DNS, HTTP, TCP, and Telegram. While the first three protocols are used to transmit the victim status, the core functionality is realized through the Telegram Bot API to upload and download files, and execute additional payloads. The harvested data is exfiltrated via curl.exe.
“Earth Baxia, likely based in China, conducted a sophisticated campaign targeting government and energy sectors in multiple APAC countries,” the researchers pointed out.
“They used advanced techniques like GeoServer exploitation, spear-phishing, and customized malware (Cobalt Strike and EAGLEDOOR) to infiltrate and exfiltrate data. The use of public cloud services for hosting malicious files and the multi-protocol support of EAGLEDOOR highlight the complexity and adaptability of their operations.”