Malware linked to Chinese hackers aims at Japanese government

Malware researchers at Seculert say they've found two more cases of highly targeted malware coming out of China, and claim to have back-traced it to the same geographical region that was fingered as the source of the Project Aurora attacks.

"It's using a similar MO – infected PDFs sent out as part of a spear-phishing campaign," Aviv Raff, CTO of Seculert, told The Register. "We resolved it and found it was reporting to an IP address in China with the same physical location as the previous attacks. They are up to something."

One of the malware samples was found to communicate with Japanese government websites, seemingly from a location in Korea. However, on Tuesdays between 8am and 7pm (local time) the malware would contact the IP address 123.234.29.35, which is found in Jinan, the capital of the Shandong province of China.