Rewterz Threat Alert – SharpPanda Chinese APT Group Targets Southeast Asian Government – 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 investigation starts from the campaign 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

• 1e9f1746c2dbea0df5017afdf8b94189
• d598749a8c86b1cdd313ff6c86626c86
• d843b58f31c687d22de09a6765b3ba3b
• 51205f6ca73745b97b77095a2bfd7091
• 8bcea4940166222eff5c4ed897e5cccf
• 31565db2614bb5de2baf1a5c07771860
• 24448ffdb1a8ba9a9202a9c7178301c4
• fc51ba4706ac462d2fec8ba2be04dc1d
• 494a01d421997040de3583b3e08212a7
• f706f042c1953a9cea932d3cd770b2ad
• eff68f1096ae56ae94f439a8e5effe3d

SHA-256

• 6f66faf278b5e78992362060d6375dcc2006bcee29ccc19347db27a250f81bcd
• 0c346972a2ccebb2642ced34213f43595896da233f06f6251967517ae342908f
• d198c4d82eba42cc3ae512e4a1d4ce85ed92f3e5fdff5c248acd7b32bd46dc75
• 0752c24ded7cc434a56fdd10c4f2c45144ca53252192e21cfa4cee3a5ad68796
• 928f540c9658a458edc649371e178a7c83e2a9291f5b23ae326c3d64bfa902c6
• 4cc521b470d08c9684cd15ffac032accd50439b81873ee2d87897ab8c495744b
• 0e8fb748cd58ab2fa754e2fa16e4390327a10593ca72bb6a3b90a1885cbe5387

SHA-1

• f9d958c537b097d45b4fca83048567a52bb597bf
• 417e4274771a9614d49493157761c12e54060588
• 176a0468dd70abe199483f1af287e5c5e2179b8c
• 8bad3d47b2fc53dc6f9e48debac9533937c32609
• aa5458bdfefe2a97611bb0fd9cf155a06f88ef5d
• 0726e56885478357de3dce13efff40bfba53ddc2

Remediation

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