19 August 2024
COVID-19 and New Year greetings: an investigation into the tools and methods used by the Higaisa group
In March 2020 specialists from the PT Expert Security Center conducted an analysis on the activities of the APT group Higaisa. This group was first studied by security analysts at Tencent in November 2019. In that analysis, Tencent specialists reached the conclusion that Higaisa has its origins in South Korea. The group, which is still active today, can be tracked all the way back to 2009.
With the recent prevalence of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, many APT groups, including Gamaredon, SongXY, TA428, Lazarus, Konni, and Winnti, have been using the topic of COVID-19 in their email distributions. Higaisa is no exception.
This article is an investigation into one of the malicious files created by Higaisa. The file was discovered by security experts on March 11 while conducting another study on information security threats. The file is also compared with earlier files, and observed changes are noted and analyzed.
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