RSS feed source: US Computer Emergency Readiness Team

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In early 2023, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) conducted a SILENTSHIELD red team assessment against a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) organization. During SILENTSHIELD assessments, the red team first performs a no-notice, long-term simulation of nation-state cyber operations. The team mimics the techniques, tradecraft, and behaviors of sophisticated threat actors and measures the potential dwell time actors have on a network, providing a realistic assessment of the organization’s security posture. Then, the team works directly with the organization’s network defenders, system administrators, and other technical staff to address strengths and weaknesses found during the assessment. The team’s goal is to assist the organization with refining their detection, response, and hunt capabilities—particularly hunting unknown threats.

In coordination with the assessed organization, CISA is releasing this Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) detailing the red team’s activity and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs); associated network defense activity; and lessons learned to provide network defenders with recommendations for improving their organization’s detection capabilities and cyber posture.

During the first phase, the SILENTSHIELD team gained initial access by exploiting a known vulnerability in an unpatched web server in the victim’s Solaris enclave. Although the team fully compromised the enclave, they were unable to move into the Windows portion of the network due to a lack of credentials. In a parallel effort, the team gained access

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RSS feed source: US Computer Emergency Readiness Team

Overview Background

This advisory, authored by the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ASD’s ACSC), the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the United States National Security Agency (NSA), the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS), the New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ), the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the Republic of Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) and NIS’ National Cyber Security Center, and Japan’s National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) and National Policy Agency (NPA)—hereafter referred to as the “authoring agencies”—outlines a People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber group and their current threat to Australian networks. The advisory draws on the authoring agencies’ shared understanding of the threat as well as ASD’s ACSC incident response investigations.

The PRC state-sponsored cyber group has previously targeted organizations in various countries, including Australia and the United States, and the techniques highlighted below are regularly used by other PRC state-sponsored actors globally. Therefore, the authoring agencies believe the group, and similar techniques remain a threat to their countries’ networks as well.

The authoring agencies assess that this group conduct malicious cyber operations for the PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS).

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