Red Charon
Throughout 2019, multiple companies in the Taiwan high-tech ecosystem were victims of an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack. Due to these APT attacks having similar behavior profiles (similar adversarial techniques, tactics, and procedures or TTP) with each other and previously documented cyberattacks, CyCraft assess with high confidence these new attacks were conducted by the same foreign threat actor. During their investigation, they dubbed this threat actor Chimera. “Chimera” stands for the synthesis of hacker tools that they’ve seen the group use, such as the skeleton key malware that contained code extracted from both Dumpert and Mimikatz — hence Chimera. Their operation — the entirety of the new attacks utilizing the Skeleton Key attack (described below) from late 2018 to late 2019, CyCraft have dubbed Operation Skeleton Key.
CVEs in recent coverage
No CVEs named alongside this actor in the last 90 days.
Recent victims
No leak-site posts on record for this group.
Recent activity
No posts or advisories have named this actor recently.
References
- https://i.blackhat.com/USA-20/Thursday/us-20-Chen-Operation-Chimera-APT-Operation-Targets-Semiconductor-Vendors.pdf
- https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-hackers-taiwan-semiconductor-industry-skeleton-key/
- https://cycraft.com/download/%5BTLP-White%5D20200415%20Chimera_V4.1.pdf
- https://medium.com/cycraft/taiwan-high-tech-ecosystem-targeted-by-foreign-apt-group-5473d2ad8730
- https://www.pwc.co.uk/cyber-security/pdf/pwc-cyber-threats-2020-a-year-in-retrospect.pdf
From the MISP threat-actor galaxy, MITRE ATT&CK and RansomLook (CC BY 4.0). Activity is any post or advisory Watch Floor collected that names the actor or one of its aliases.