A previously undocumented China-aligned threat cluster dubbed LongNosedGoblin has been attributed to a series of cyber attacks targeting governmental entities in Southeast Asia and Japan.
The end goal of these attacks is cyber espionage, Slovak cybersecurity company ESET said in a report published today. The threat activity cluster has been assessed to be active since at least September 2023.
"LongNosedGoblin uses Group Policy to deploy malware across the compromised network, and cloud services (e.g., Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive) as command and control (C&C) servers," security researchers Anton Cherepanov and Peter Strýček said.
Group Policy is a mechanism for managing settings and permissions on Windows machines. According to Microsoft, Group Policy can be used to define configurations for groups of users and client computers, as well as manage server computers.