China-Based Scarlet Mimic Conducts Surveillance of Minorities

Scarlet Mimic, name of one cyber-espionage group in China, which uses own-built programs for spying, has been carrying out its operations since four years now. The group, engaged for a specific purpose, attacks China's minorities mostly the Tibetan and Uyghur population. The two minority groups have been opposing China's political leadership starting from end of World War II when the Communist Party of China assumed government power in the country.

It was from 1950 when the Chinese Liberation Army got into the maximum area of Tibetan territory that the local people there have been protesting Chinese authority. It's common to find Tibetan dissents, while starting 2009, almost 140 individuals thus far have wholly burnt themselves to show they disapproved Chinese invasion. SM installed FakeM, one backdoor Trojan on Windows PCs. The Trojan was Trend Micro's discovery that named it 'Circa.' The two backdoors hit the headlines at their first discovery as they disguised as Facebook and Yahoo Messenger while interacting with their command-and-control systems.

Other than attacking minorities, according to Palo Alto Security Company, Scarlet Mimic targeted government organizations within India and Russia as well. These organizations worked to trace terrorists and activists operating outside the countries. Softpedia posted this, January 25, 2016.

Palo Alto states that there aren't clues of these attacks' direct linkage to any source in the governments; however, they feel based on an assessment of the activities that certain group(s) having likewise purpose as the Chinese authority's behavior towards these targets maybe at work. During past few years, there were fingers pointing at Chinese authority of carrying out many high-profile espionage schemes. There was wide suspicion on Chinese government about being responsible for hacking into the cloud storage of Apple, probably for tracing Hong Kong-based protesters.

SM continued its techniques for contaminating Web-surfers i.e. sending them spear-phishing e-mails or targeting them with watering hole assaults. The latest assaults by the group, during 2015, were against China's Muslim population. Moreover, the group watched organizations condemning President Putin and his government. Scarlet Mimic seems to have extremely good funding. Its targets are very clear i.e. not stealing financial data, but drawing political information.

» SPAMfighter News - 2/1/2016