Introduction
FireEye has examined a range of TEMP.Periscope activity revealing extensive interest in Cambodia's politics, with active compromises of multiple Cambodian entities related to the country’s electoral system. This includes compromises of Cambodian government entities charged with overseeing the elections, as well as the targeting of opposition figures. This campaign occurs in the run up to the country’s July 29, 2018, general elections. TEMP.Periscope used the same infrastructure for a range of activity against other more traditional targets, including the defense industrial base in the United States and a chemical company based in Europe. Our previous blog post focused on the group’s targeting of engineering and maritime entities in the United States.
Overall, this activity indicates that the group maintains an extensive intrusion architecture and wide array of malicious tools, and targets a large victim set, which is in line with typical Chinese-based APT efforts. We expect this activity to provide the Chinese government with widespread visibility into Cambodian elections and government operations. Additionally, this group is clearly able to run several large-scale intrusions concurrently across a wide range of victim types.
Our analysis also strengthened our overall attribution of this group. We observed the toolsets we previously attributed to this group, their observed targets are in line with past group efforts and also highly similar to known Chinese APT efforts, and we identified an IP address originating in Hainan, China that was used to remotely access and administer a command and control (C2) server.
TEMP.Periscope Background
Active since at least 2013, TEMP.Periscope has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals, including engineering firms, shipping and transportation, manufacturing, defense, government offices, and research universities (targeting is summarized in Figure 1). The group has also targeted professional/consulting services, high-tech industry, healthcare, and media/publishing. TEMP.Periscope overlaps in targeting, as well as tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), with TEMP.Jumper, a group that also overlaps significantly with public reporting by Proofpoint and F-Secure on "NanHaiShu."
Incident Background
FireEye analyzed files on three open indexes believed to be controlled by TEMP.Periscope, which yielded insight into the group's objectives, operational tactics, and a significant amount of technical attribution/validation. These files were "open indexed" and thus accessible to anyone on the public internet. This TEMP.Periscope activity on these servers extends from at least April 2017 to the present, with the most current operations focusing on Cambodia's government and elections.
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Two servers, chemscalere[.]com and scsnewstoday[.]com, operate as typical C2 servers and hosting sites, while the third, mlcdailynews[.]com, functions as an active SCANBOX server. The C2 servers contained both logs and malware.
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Analysis of logs from the three servers revealed:
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Potential actor logins from an IP address located in Hainan, China that was used to remotely access and administer the servers, and interact with malware deployed at victim organizations.
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Malware command and control check-ins from victim organizations in the education, aviation, chemical, defense, government, maritime, and technology sectors across multiple regions. FireEye has notified all of the victims that we were able to identify.
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The malware present on the servers included both new families (DADBOD, EVILTECH) and previously identified malware families (AIRBREAK, EVILTECH, HOMEFRY, MURKYTOP, HTRAN, and SCANBOX) .
Compromises of Cambodian Election Entities
Analysis of command and control logs on the servers revealed compromises of multiple Cambodian entities, primarily those relating to the upcoming July 2018 elections. In addition, a separate spear phishing email analyzed by FireEye indicates concurrent targeting of opposition figures within Cambodia by TEMP.Periscope.
Analysis indicated that the following Cambodian government organizations and individuals were compromised by TEMP.Periscope:
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National Election Commission, Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Cambodian Senate, Ministry of Economics and Finance
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Member of Parliament representing Cambodia National Rescue Party
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Multiple Cambodians advocating human rights and democracy who have written critically of the current ruling party
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Two Cambodian diplomats serving overseas
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Multiple Cambodian media entities
TEMP.Periscope sent a spear phish with AIRBREAK malware to Monovithya Kem, Deputy Director-General, Public Affairs, Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), and the daughter of (imprisoned) Cambodian opposition party leader Kem Sokha (Figure 2). The decoy document purports to come from LICADHO (a non-governmental organization [NGO] in Cambodia established in 1992 to promote human rights). This sample leveraged scsnewstoday[.]com for C2.