DailyPost 2829
TAIWAN -HACK’s PRIME TARGET
The nature of cyber attack and its persistence is decided by the geopolitics of the region. It is also a manifestation of the bilateral relationships of two countries. If one fails to extract what it intends to, out of the other, cyber attacks can be one of the ways to avenge. Forcing the adversarial nation to fall in line, with immense pressure exerted through cyber attacks is a ploy which, quite a few times, is successful. At the barest minimum it brings the country to the negotiating table. In this backdrop, we need to understand the cyber security rip-off in Taiwan. In recent years, relations between China and Taiwan, a self-governed island across the Taiwan Strait that Beijing claims to be its territory, have deteriorated.
The strained relations would lead to major bouts of hacking, more so when the adversary in China, an old expert in this game. As expected, a suspected Chinese state-sponsored group has gotten into the act in a big way. It has stepped up targeting Taiwanese organisations, having an undue focus on government, education, technology and diplomacy. This makes the motive very clear. The name of the group is RedJuliett. The pattern of escalated attacks have been observed between November 2023 and April 2024. The attacks were coterminous with the period leading up to Taiwan’s presidential elections in January.
The attacks went ahead through the subsequent change in administration. Not that RedJuliett was targeting Taiwan for the first time, what was worth noticing the scale of such activity, scary to say the least. RedJuliett has been on a hacking spree in other parts of the globe too. Recorded Future talks about the methodology deployed for the purpose. The servers were accessed via a vulnerability in their SoftEther enterprise VPN software. This is an open-source VPN that allows remote connections to an organisation’s networks. One would certainly like to know the scale, which was done with a purpose of debilitating Taiwan.
RedJuliett has been attempting to break into systems of more than 70 Taiwanese organisations which included 3 universities. What is fascinating is that it did not spare companies which had contracts with the government. This included an optoelectronics company and a facial recognition company as well. What is not known with clarity is whether RedJuliett managed to break into these organisations. Recorded Futures argument is that it observed the attempts to identify vulnerabilities in their networks. It can be taken with a pinch of salt. The hacking patterns match those of Chinese state-sponsored actors. RedJuliett based on geolocation of IP addresses is likely to be based out of Fuzhou, China.
HACKS ARE A PREDOMINANT TOOL USED BY ALL NATIONS TODAY.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.