• The increase in Chinese language malware activity indicates an expansion of the Chinese malware ecosystem, either through increased availability or ease of access to payloads and target lists, as well as potentially increased activity by Chinese speaking cybercrime operators.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Since early 2023, Proofpoint has observed an increase in the email distribution of malware associated with suspected Chinese cybercrime activity. This includes the attempted delivery of the Sainbox Remote Access Trojan (RAT) – a variant of the commodity trojan Gh0stRAT – and the newly identified ValleyRAT malware. After years of this malware not appearing in Proofpoint threat data, its appearance in multiple campaigns over the last six months is notable.

The phrase “Chinese-themed” is used to describe content related to this malicious activity, including lures, malware, targeting, and metadata that contains Chinese language usage.

Campaigns are generally low-volume and are typically sent to global organizations with operations in China. The email subjects and content are usually written in Chinese, and are typically related to business themes like invoices, payments, and new products. The targeted users have Chinese-language names spelled with Chinese-language characters, or specific company email addresses that appear to align with businesses' operations in China. Although most campaigns have targeted Chinese speaking users, Proofpoint observed one campaign targeting Japanese organizations, suggesting a potential expansion of activity.

These recently identified activity clusters have demonstrated flexible delivery methods, leveraging both simple and moderately complex techniques. Commonly, the emails contain URLs linking to compressed executables that are responsible for installing the malware. Proofpoint has also observed Sainbox RAT and ValleyRAT delivered via Excel and PDF attachments containing URLs linking to compressed executables.

Research into additional activity clusters utilizing these malwares demonstrate enough variety in infrastructure, sender domains, email content, targeting, and payloads that researchers currently conclude that all use of these malwares and associated campaigns are not attributable to the same cluster, but likely multiple distinct activity sets.

The emergence and uptick of both novel and older Chinese-themed malware demonstrates a new trend in the overall 2023 threat landscape. A blend of historic malware such as Sainbox – a variant of the older Gh0stRAT malware – and the newly uncovered ValleyRAT may challenge the dominance that the Russian-speaking cybercrime market has on the threat landscape. However, the Chinese-themed malware is currently mostly targeted toward users that likely speak Chinese. Proofpoint continues to monitor for evidence of increasing adoption across other languages.

With this resurgence of Chinese themed malware, the questions arise: is the impact of older malware easier to detect due to its age? Does mature detection always mean mature security? Based on Proofpoint’s analysis, the answer is not necessarily, as older malware can still be effective, especially when threat actors constantly change tactics by rotating IPs, domains, encoding, and obfuscation. Consequently, even though these malware families are not new, organizations cannot afford to underestimate the risk they pose.

Proofpoint research suggests that this activity does not seem to be related to a single entity but rather appears to be a cluster of activities based on temporal patterns. The appearance of ValleyRAT alongside the older families hints at the possibility of their relation in terms of timing. Proofpoint anticipates ValleyRAT will be used more frequently in the future. 

Raising awareness in 2023 about the reappearance of these threats serves as an informational bulletin for the community. While new and sophisticated threats seemingly dominate the daily threat landscape, it is essential to maintain a balanced perspective by acknowledging seemingly less significant risks that persist. Despite being neither new nor advanced, Sainbox RAT still poses a threat in 2023, and ValleyRAT is an emerging threat in this space.

For more insights, please visit Chinese Malware Appears in Earnest Across Cybercrime Threat Landscape

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