Rewterz Threat Alert – SharpPanda APT Group – Active IOCs

Severity

High

Analysis Summary

SharpPanda, the Chinese advanced persistent (APT) threat actor that has been active since at least 2018, has reinforced its cyber warfare activities. SharpPanda APT attacks and targets Southeast Asian government users with template injection of malicious documents. The attackers use spear-phishing to gain initial access and leverage old Microsoft Office vulnerabilities together with the chain of in-memory loaders to attempt and install a previously unknown backdoor on the victim’s machines. Upon opening the document, it connects back to the hacker’s server to download the payload file.

The campaign that initiates at the beginning of 2022 starts from the distribution of malicious DOCX documents that are sent to different employees of a government entity in Southeast Asia. In some cases, the emails are spoofed to look like they were from other government-related entities. The attachments to these emails are weaponized copies of legitimate-looking official documents and use the remote template technique to pull the next stage from the attacker’s server.

Impact

• Template Injection
• Exposure of Sensitive Data

Indicators of Compromise

IP

• 45[.]91[.]225[.]139
• 107[.]148[.]165[.]151
• 45[.]121[.]146[.]88

MD5

• 22f88a6d8729a08b457d078a798ef01f

SHA-256

• 1a15a35065ec7c2217ca6a4354877e6a1de610861311174984232ba5ff749114

SHA-1

• 879bfd34263da06b057a6fc05a07095a6cab58d3

Remediation

• Block the threat indicators at their respective controls.
• Search for IOCs in your environment.