Chinese cyber espionage growing across all industry sectors

Vault Panda and Envoy Panda are two groups that target government entities, but whereas Vault Panda is broad in its targeting, also going after financial services, gambling, technology, academic, and defense organizations, Envoy Panda seems focused on diplomatic entities, especially from Africa and the Middle East.

Vault Panda has used many malware families shared by Chinese threat actors, including KEYPLUG, Winnti, Melofee, HelloBot, and ShadowPad. The group regularly exploits vulnerabilities in public-facing web applications to gain initial access. Meanwhile Envoy Panda is known for its use of Turian, PlugX, and Smanager. PlugX, aka Korplug, is one of the oldest remote access trojans used by China-linked cyber espionage groups, with original versions dating back to 2008.

Another commonly shared resource between Chinese threat groups are so-called ORB (Operational Relay Box) networks that consist of thousands of compromised IoT devices and virtual private servers that are used to route traffic and conceal espionage operations. These networks are similar to botnets, but are primarily used as proxies, and are often administered by independent contractors that are based in China. They complicate attribution due to the often short-lived nature of the IP addresses of the nodes being used.