Chinese Hacking Group Codoso Team Uses Forbes.com As Watering Hole

Another day, another cyberespionage campaign attributed to a Chinese hacking group. Today's newly identified hacking push is a watering hole attack against Forbes and other targets last November that's been attributed by iSIGHT Partners and Invincea to likely be the handiwork of a long-running group they call Codoso Team, but which has also been named as Sunshop Group. The campaign was made possible by a zero-day attack that strung together a now-patched Adobe vulnerability with a bypass vulnerability in Microsoft's ASLR technology for Internet Explorer that the company patched today.

Research evidence only showed the attack to occur over a couple of days, but in addition to some highly targeted web properties it infected the Thought of the Day widget on Forbes.com with the intent to perform drive-by-download attacks via the Flash vulnerability. In spite of the mainstream appeal via Forbes, which is ranked by Alexa as the 61st most popular website on the Internet, the targets of this attack were fairly narrow. Attackers seemed to be going after defense sector firms, Chinese dissident groups and other political target, as well as certain financial targets and other commercial targets in pharmaceutical and energy sectors that could benefit the Chinese economy.