A China-aligned advanced persistent threat actor known as TA413 weaponized recently disclosed flaws in Sophos Firewall and Microsoft Office to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor called LOWZERO as part of an espionage campaign aimed at Tibetan entities.
Targets primarily consisted of organizations associated with the Tibetan community, including enterprises associated with the Tibetan government-in-exile.
The intrusions involved the exploitation of CVE-2022-1040 and CVE-2022-30190 (aka “Follina”), two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Sophos Firewall and Microsoft Office, respectively.
“This willingness to rapidly incorporate new techniques and methods of initial access contrasts with the group’s continued use of well known and reported capabilities, such as the Royal Road RTF weaponizer, and often lax infrastructure procurement tendencies,” Recorded Future said in a new technical analysis.
