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TIDRONE, a threat actor linked to Chinese-speaking groups, targets military-related industry chains in Taiwan

• TIDRONE, an unidentified threat actor linked to Chinese-speaking groups, has demonstrated significant interest in military-related industry chains, especially in the manufacturers of drones’ sector in Taiwan

• The threat cluster uses enterprise resource planning (ERP) software or remote desktops to deploy advanced malware toolsets such as the CXCLNT and CLNTEND.

• CXCLNT has basic upload and download file capabilities, along with features for clearing traces, collecting victim information such as file listings and computer names, and downloading additional portable executable (PE) files for execution

• CLNTEND is a newly discovered remote access tool (RAT) that was used this April and supports a wider range of network protocols for communication

• During the post-exploitation phase, telemetry logs revealed user account control (UAC) bypass techniques, credential dumping, and hacktool usage to disable antivirus products.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2595305

Two sanctioned Russian oligarchs have become part-owners of the UK's largest oil producer after it completed a deal to buy a German firm.

LetterOne, the investment company part-owned by oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, now owns nearly 15% of Harbour Energy.

LetterOne itself is not sanctioned, and the two Russians have no contact with the firm and don't receive any share of its profits.

Harbour Energy is the largest oil and gas producer in UK waters. It has bought most of the oil and gas production assets of a Germany-based firm, Wintershall DEA, from the chemicals giant BASF.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2595155

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Russian companies have been able to purchase spare parts for outdated microchip-making machines produced by Dutch tech giant ASML through Chinese intermediaries since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Dutch daily Trouw reported Wednesday, citing Russian customs data.

Small Russian importers reportedly obtained these parts at least 170 times between February 2022 and December 2023. Trouw noted that Russian trading firms continued to obtain “countless” spare parts on the secondary market.

The imported parts are suited for ASML machines built from the late 1990s and to the early 2000s, which, according to the report, remain “very useful for chips in everyday devices and weapons.”

Although tools from that era are not considered “dual use” — or technology with potential military applications — Trouw suggested they could still be used in the production of missiles, drones, tanks and military aircraft.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2595222

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Japan vowed to bolster military ties with Australia during a high-ranking visit on Sept 5, with Tokyo’s top diplomat saying the “like-minded” partners must stick together to combat shared regional threats.

Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa and Defence Minister Minoru Kihara met their Australian counterparts at an old army fort outside Melbourne, striking deals on greater air force cooperation and expanded military exercises.

They also agreed to jointly help the Philippine Coast Guard, which is locked in an escalating tussle with Chinese ships in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2595239

Major Russian banks have called on the central bank to take action to counter a yuan liquidity deficit, which has led to the rouble tumbling to its lowest level since April against the Chinese currency and driven yuan swap rates into triple digits.

The rouble fell by almost 5% against the yuan on Sept. 4 on the Moscow Stock Exchange (MOEX) after the finance ministry's plans for forex interventions implied that the central bank's daily yuan sales would plunge in the coming month to the equivalent of $200 million.

The central bank had been selling $7.3 billion worth of yuan per day during the past month. The plunge coincided with oil giant Rosneft's 15 billion yuan bond placement, which also sapped liquidity from the market.

"We cannot lend in yuan because we have nothing to cover our foreign currency positions with," said Sberbank CEO German Gref, stressing that the central bank needed to participate more actively in the market. The yuan has become the most traded foreign currency on MOEX after Western sanctions halted exchange trade in dollars and euros, with many banks developing yuan-denominated products for their clients. Yuan liquidity is mainly provided by the central bank through daily sales and one-day yuan swaps, as well as through currency sales by exporting companies.

Chinese banks in Russia, meanwhile, are avoiding currency trading for fear of secondary Western sanctions.

Archived link

Japan vowed to bolster military ties with Australia during a high-ranking visit on Sept 5, with Tokyo’s top diplomat saying the “like-minded” partners must stick together to combat shared regional threats.

Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa and Defence Minister Minoru Kihara met their Australian counterparts at an old army fort outside Melbourne, striking deals on greater air force cooperation and expanded military exercises.

They also agreed to jointly help the Philippine Coast Guard, which is locked in an escalating tussle with Chinese ships in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2595100

Archived link.

Despite increasingly repressive efforts to prevent free expression under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), dissent in China occurs regularly. Issue 8 of the China Dissent Monitor (CDM), released last week, marked two years of Freedom House’s efforts to monitor these protests. With 6,400 events logged, CDM’s second anniversary is a good occasion to reflect on what we’ve learned about who is protesting in China, what it looks like, where it’s happening, and how often. Here are eight key takeaways.

Dissident occurs regularly, and economic issues play a major role.

Documenting nearly 6,400 dissent events over two years.

• CDM logged 805 dissent events in the second quarter of 2024, a 18 percent increase over the same period in 2023. The majority of events are labor (44 percent) and homeowner (21 percent) protests, with the remainder involving diverse groups like rural residents, students, parents, investors, consumers, members of religious groups, activists, Tibetans, ethnic Mongolians, and members of the LGBT+ community.

• The top regions for protest events were Guangdong (13 percent), followed by Shandong, Hebei, Henan, and Zhejiang. CDM has logged a total of 6,300 cases of dissent since data collection began in June 2022.

• Land grabs and corruption in rural China. CDM documented 228 protests led by rural residents over the past two years, most of which were linked to forced relocation and unfair land acquisition. These cases shed light on the corruption and discontent that arises from widespread land expropriation.

• Over 2,800 protests linked to the struggling property sector. Dissent by homeowners and construction workers constitute 44 percent of all dissent cases in CDM’s database, reflecting the major impact of the real estate crisis on citizens’ livelihoods. Despite central government attempts to abate the sector’s collapse, CDM data indicates that protest frequency has not declined.

Here is the full China Dissent Monitor -- (archived)

Tropic Trooper (also known as KeyBoy and Pirate Panda) is an APT group active since 2011. This group has traditionally targeted sectors such as government, healthcare, transportation and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines and Hong Kong. Our recent investigation has revealed that in 2024 they conducted persistent campaigns targeting a government entity in the Middle East, starting in June 2023.

Sighting this group’s TTPs in critical governmental entities in the Middle East, particularly those related to human rights studies, marks a new strategic move for them. This can help the threat intelligence community better understand the motives of this threat actor.

The infection came to our attention in June 2024, when our telemetry gave recurring alerts for a new China Chopper web shell variant (used by many Chinese-speaking actors), which was found on a public web server. The server was hosting an open-source content management system (CMS) called Umbraco, written in C#. The observed web shell component was compiled as a .NET module of Umbraco CMS.

In our subsequent investigation, we looked for more suspicious detections on this public server and identified multiple malware sets. These include post-exploitation tools, which, we assess with medium confidence, are related to and leveraged in this intrusion.

Furthermore, we identified new DLL search-order hijacking implants that are loaded from a legitimate vulnerable executable as it lacks the full path specification to the DLL it needs. This attack chain was attempting to load the Crowdoor loader, which is half-named after the SparrowDoor backdoor, detailed by ESET. During the attack, the security agent blocked the first Crowdoor loader, prompting the attackers to switch to a new, previously unreported variant, with almost the same impact.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2564197

The head of US Space Command said Wednesday he would like to see more transparency from the Chinese government on space debris, especially as one of China's newer rockets has shown a propensity for breaking apart and littering low-Earth orbit with hundreds of pieces of space junk.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of US Space Command, said he has observed some improvement in the dialogue between US and Chinese military officials this year. But the disintegration of the upper stage from a Long March 6A rocket earlier this month showed China could do more to prevent the creation of space debris and communicate openly about it when it happens.

The Chinese government acknowledged the breakup of the Long March 6A rocket's upper stage in a statement by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs on August 14, more than a week after the rocket's launch August 6 with the first batch of 18 Internet satellites for a megaconstellation of thousands of spacecraft analogous to SpaceX's Starlink network.

Space Command reported it detected more than 300 objects associated with the breakup of the upper stage in orbit, and LeoLabs, a commercial space situational awareness company, said its radars detected at least 700 objects attributed to the Chinese rocket.

"I hope the next time there's a rocket like that, that leaves a lot of debris, that it's not our sensors that are the first to detect that, but we're getting communications to help us understand that, just like we communicate with others," Whiting said at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute marking the fifth anniversary of the reestablishment of Space Command.

[...]

Last November, [U.S.] President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to resume military-to-military communications between each nation's armed forces, which were suspended in 2022. US and Chinese military leaders have met face to face several times this year, and Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, met with Xi and Chinese military leaders this week in Beijing. The meetings have focused on terrestrial concerns and operational matters, such as reducing the risk of miscalculations, or an accidental escalation or conflict between Chinese airplanes and ships and those from the United States and its allies.

[...]

China has a track record of leaving behind a lot of space junk. LeoLabs says there are nearly 1,000 abandoned rocket bodies in low-Earth orbit, with an average mass of 1.5 metric tons.

"That number continues to grow, posing a significant risk to the space environment," LeoLabs said in a statement. "While Russia and the US have improved their 'rocket body abandonment behavior' over the last 20 years, the relative contribution by other countries has grown by a factor of five and China by 50x.

"The rate that China is leaving abandoned rocket bodies in orbit reverses the improved behavior of US and Russia and results in a continual accumulation of objects that will be especially prolific in creating fragments if involved in a collision," LeoLabs engineers wrote in a paper last year.

LeoLabs researchers found the total mass of all rocket hardware in low-Earth orbit (LEO) is currently nearly 1,500 metric tons. "Sadly, the rate of rocket body mass abandonment in LEO has actually increased in the last 20 years relative to the first (approximately) 45 years of the space age."

The head of US Space Command said Wednesday he would like to see more transparency from the Chinese government on space debris, especially as one of China's newer rockets has shown a propensity for breaking apart and littering low-Earth orbit with hundreds of pieces of space junk.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of US Space Command, said he has observed some improvement in the dialogue between US and Chinese military officials this year. But the disintegration of the upper stage from a Long March 6A rocket earlier this month showed China could do more to prevent the creation of space debris and communicate openly about it when it happens.

The Chinese government acknowledged the breakup of the Long March 6A rocket's upper stage in a statement by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs on August 14, more than a week after the rocket's launch August 6 with the first batch of 18 Internet satellites for a megaconstellation of thousands of spacecraft analogous to SpaceX's Starlink network.

Space Command reported it detected more than 300 objects associated with the breakup of the upper stage in orbit, and LeoLabs, a commercial space situational awareness company, said its radars detected at least 700 objects attributed to the Chinese rocket.

"I hope the next time there's a rocket like that, that leaves a lot of debris, that it's not our sensors that are the first to detect that, but we're getting communications to help us understand that, just like we communicate with others," Whiting said at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute marking the fifth anniversary of the reestablishment of Space Command.

[...]

Last November, [U.S.] President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to resume military-to-military communications between each nation's armed forces, which were suspended in 2022. US and Chinese military leaders have met face to face several times this year, and Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, met with Xi and Chinese military leaders this week in Beijing. The meetings have focused on terrestrial concerns and operational matters, such as reducing the risk of miscalculations, or an accidental escalation or conflict between Chinese airplanes and ships and those from the United States and its allies.

[...]

China has a track record of leaving behind a lot of space junk. LeoLabs says there are nearly 1,000 abandoned rocket bodies in low-Earth orbit, with an average mass of 1.5 metric tons.

"That number continues to grow, posing a significant risk to the space environment," LeoLabs said in a statement. "While Russia and the US have improved their 'rocket body abandonment behavior' over the last 20 years, the relative contribution by other countries has grown by a factor of five and China by 50x.

"The rate that China is leaving abandoned rocket bodies in orbit reverses the improved behavior of US and Russia and results in a continual accumulation of objects that will be especially prolific in creating fragments if involved in a collision," LeoLabs engineers wrote in a paper last year.

LeoLabs researchers found the total mass of all rocket hardware in low-Earth orbit (LEO) is currently nearly 1,500 metric tons. "Sadly, the rate of rocket body mass abandonment in LEO has actually increased in the last 20 years relative to the first (approximately) 45 years of the space age."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2563949

Archived link

The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.

Hong Kong has introduced Xi Jinping Thought as a new addition to the curriculum for some students.

Xi has been the president of the People's Republic of China since 2013.

The new school year began in Hong Kong this week.

The changes come alongside more lessons about national security and pro-Beijing patriotism, as the influence and control of China’s ruling Communist party increases in the semi-autonomous city, The Guardian reported.

The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.

[...]

The new module instils “patriotic education” for all three years of secondary students, and its content is aimed at “cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity”, according to government-issued curriculum guidelines. Third form students are expected to learn about Xi Jinping Thought in a module on “our country’s political structure and participation in international affairs”. The guidelines recommend teachers spend 12 40-minute lessons on the module.

Xi’s personal political philosophy, officially called “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, was enshrined in China’s constitution in 2018. In 2021 it was introduced into mainland Chinese schools. The Xi teachings in the mainland curriculum appear on available information to be far more comprehensive that those introduced to Hong Kong. However it has still sparked alarm among some parents and citizens.

Hong Kong school enrolments have declined sharply in recent years, driven by low birthrates and an exodus of residents and expats in the wake of the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement and the imposition of tighter, pro-CCP social controls.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2563949

Archived link

The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.

Hong Kong has introduced Xi Jinping Thought as a new addition to the curriculum for some students.

Xi has been the president of the People's Republic of China since 2013.

The new school year began in Hong Kong this week.

The changes come alongside more lessons about national security and pro-Beijing patriotism, as the influence and control of China’s ruling Communist party increases in the semi-autonomous city, The Guardian reported.

The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.

[...]

The new module instils “patriotic education” for all three years of secondary students, and its content is aimed at “cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity”, according to government-issued curriculum guidelines. Third form students are expected to learn about Xi Jinping Thought in a module on “our country’s political structure and participation in international affairs”. The guidelines recommend teachers spend 12 40-minute lessons on the module.

Xi’s personal political philosophy, officially called “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, was enshrined in China’s constitution in 2018. In 2021 it was introduced into mainland Chinese schools. The Xi teachings in the mainland curriculum appear on available information to be far more comprehensive that those introduced to Hong Kong. However it has still sparked alarm among some parents and citizens.

Hong Kong school enrolments have declined sharply in recent years, driven by low birthrates and an exodus of residents and expats in the wake of the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement and the imposition of tighter, pro-CCP social controls.