• ESET researchers discovered a new China-aligned advanced persistence threat (APT) group, CeranaKeeper, targeting governmental institutions in Thailand. Some of its tools were previously attributed to Mustang Panda by other researchers.
• Massive amounts of data have been exfiltrated in the attack against the Thai government.
• The group constantly updates its backdoors to evade detection and diversifies its methods to aid massive data exfiltration.
• CeranaKeeper abuses popular, legitimate cloud and file-sharing services such as Dropbox, GitHub, and OneDrive to implement custom backdoors and extraction tools.

MONTREAL, BRATISLAVA — October 2, 2024 — ESET researchers have discovered several targeted campaigns against governmental institutions in Thailand, starting in 2023, where massive amounts of data have been exfiltrated. The campaigns misused legitimate file-sharing services such as Dropbox, PixelDrain, GitHub, and OneDrive in the process. Based on the findings, ESET researchers decided to track this activity cluster as the work of a separate threat actor, which ESET named CeranaKeeper. The numerous occurrences of the string “bectrl” in the code of the group’s tools inspired the name: a wordplay between the word beekeeper and the bee species Apis Cerana, or the Asian honeybee. ESET presented its findings about CeranaKeeper and the compromise in Thailand at the 2024 Virus Bulletin conference.

The threat actor behind the attacks on the Thai government, CeranaKeeper, seems particularly relentless, as the plethora of tools and techniques used by the group keeps evolving at a rapid rate. The operators write and rewrite their toolset as needed and react rather quickly to avoid detection. This group’s goal is to harvest as many files as possible and it develops specific components to that end. CeranaKeeper uses cloud and file-sharing services for exfiltration and probably relies on the fact that traffic to these popular services would mostly seem legitimate and harder to block when identified.

CeranaKeeper has been active since at least the beginning of 2022, mainly targeting governmental entities in Asia such as Thailand, Myanmar, the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan.

The Thai attacks leveraged revamped versions of components previously attributed by other researchers to the China-aligned APT group Mustang Panda, and later, a new set of tools that abuse service providers such as Pastebin, Dropbox, OneDrive, and GitHub to execute commands on compromised computers and exfiltrate sensitive documents.  However, the review of the tactics, techniques and procedures, code, and infrastructure discrepancies leads ESET to believe that tracking CeranaKeeper and MustangPanda as two separate entities is necessary. Both China-aligned groups could be sharing information and a subset of tools in a common interest or through the same third party.

“Despite some resemblances in their activities like similar side-loading targets and archive format, ESET observed distinct organizational and technical differences between the two groups, such as differences in their toolsets, infrastructure, operational practices, and campaigns. We also noted differences in the way the two groups accomplish similar tasks,” explains ESET researcher Romain Dumont, who discovered CeranaKeeper.

CeranaKeeper is likely using the publicly documented toolset called “bespoke stagers” (or TONESHELL), which heavily relies on a side-loading technique, and uses a specific sequence of commands to exfiltrate files from a compromised network. In their operations, CeranaKeeper deploys components known to be unique to the group and are deployed in their operations.  Furthermore, the group left some metadata in its code that provided ESET with insight into its development process, further solidifying our attribution to CeranaKeeper.

After gaining privileged access, the attackers installed the TONESHELL backdoor, deployed a tool to dump credentials, and used a legitimate Avast driver and a custom application to disable security products on the machine. From this compromised server, they used a remote administration console to deploy and execute their backdoor on other computers in the network.  The group deployed a new BAT script across the network, extending their reach to other machines by exploiting the domain controller to gain Domain Admin privileges.

In the attack against the Thai government, the attackers found and selected a couple of compromised computers of sufficient interest to deploy previously undocumented, custom tools. These support tools were used not only to facilitate the exfiltration of documents to public storage services but also to act as alternative backdoors. One notable technique the group uses is GitHub’s pull request and issue comment features to create a stealthy reverse shell, leveraging GitHub, a popular online platform for sharing and collaborating on code, as a C&C server.

For a more detailed analysis and technical breakdown of CeranaKeeper’s tools, check out the latest ESET Research white paper “CeranaKeeper: A relentless, shape-shifting group targeting Thailand”  on WeLiveSecurity.com. Make sure to follow ESET Research on Twitter (today known as X) for the latest news from ESET Research.

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