Certificate Authority being targeted by the State-sponsored chinese cyberespionage (Billbug)

Billbug Stat-sponsored Chinese cyber-espionage targets certificate authorities and Government agencies in multiple Asian countries Symantec said in his report.
previously known Lotus Blossom , Billbug cyber-espionage is advance persistent threat actor active since 2009 and Symantec reported this type of activity 2018 and 2019  under the name Thrip . Now Symantec is sure that Thrip and Billbug is most likely the same group and no tracking all activity under the name Billbug.

 

"In activity documented by Symantec in 2019, we detailed how the group was using a backdoor known as Hannotog (Backdoor.Hannotog) and another backdoor known as Sagerunex (Backdoor.Sagerunex). Both these tools were also seen in this more recent activity.

The victims in this campaign included a certificate authority, as well as government and defense agencies. All the victims were based in various countries in Asia. Billbug is known to focus on targets in Asian countries. In at least one of the government victims, a large number of machines on the network were compromised by the attackers.

The targeting of a certificate authority is notable, as if the attackers were able to successfully compromise it to access certificates they could potentially use them to sign malware with a valid certificate, and help it avoid detection on victim machines. It could also potentially use compromised certificates to intercept HTTPS traffic. However, although this is a possible motivation for targeting a certificate authority, Symantec has seen no evidence to suggest they were successful in compromising digital certificates. Symantec has notified the cert authority in question to inform them of this activity."

This activity has been ongoing since at least March 2022.  Symantec wrote

Symantec also released a list of indicators 

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