Some of these [companies' are heavily involved in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector, suggesting that the operation may be linked to North Korea's current efforts to scale up its drone program," ESET security researchers Peter Kálnai and Alexis Rapin said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It's assessed that the end goal of the campaign is to plunder proprietary information and manufacturing know-how using malware families such as ScoringMathTea and MISTPEN.
The cyber espionage activity was first flagged by the Russian cybersecurity vendor in November 2024, when it disclosed a set of attacks aimed at government entities in Latin America and East Asia in June, using never-before-seen malware families tracked as Neursite and NeuralExecutor. It also described the operation as exhibiting a high level of sophistication, with the threat actors leveraging already compromised internal servers as an intermediate command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to fly under the radar.
The threat actor leveraged combinations of sophisticated and stealthy techniques creating multilayered attack kill chains to facilitate access to restricted and segmented network assets within presumed to be isolated environments.
APT36's focus on Linux-specific systems, particularly those used in government infrastructure, reinforces that no operating system is off-limits to nation-state attackers. This kind of multi-layered phishing attack highlights how threat actors are constantly evolving their tactics to quietly bypass defenses and exploit user trust.
