Goblin Panda, Flying Kitten and CyberBerkut might sound like the lineup of a music festival, but online security firm CrowdStrike said they were three of the most prominent cyberthreats last year.
The company’s annual Global Threat Intel Report identifies activity from 39 groups last year, dividing them into four categories: criminals, “hacktivists,” state-sponsored groups and nationalist adversaries.
The entities target firms and individuals with a range of threats, from malware to hacking Web sites for propaganda purposes.
“Western businesses and enterprises need to know that there are serious bad guys in North Korea, China, Iran, Russia and other countries working tirelessly on ways to get around our defenses to steal intellectual property, disrupt business and even destroy,” CrowdStrike intelligence vice president Adam Meyers said as the report was published.
Goblin Panda made Vietnam the most-targeted nation in CrowdStrike’s research, with the group’s activities — fueled by “tensions in the South China Sea” — including “spear phishing” attacks attempting to install malware on computers, often using decoy documents.
“The content of these decoys often came from documents produced by Vietnam’s government, which indicates that the adversary possibly infiltrated the government’s network and was using stolen documents in its operations,” the report said.
Flying Kitten is a group thought to be based in Iran, with CrowdStrike identifying its campaign early last year to target a defense company in the US with fake Web sites trying to get people to provide their credentials, then download malware.
“Shortly after this activity was identified, other campaigns against additional targets in the defense and aerospace sectors were observed,” the report said, adding that Flying Kitten also targeted Iranian dissidents elsewhere in the world.
CrowdStrike also tracked the activities of a separate group, Charming Kitten, which last year used fake profiles on social networking sites to ensnare its targets in the US government, as well as the defense industry.
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