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VOLT TYPHOON RAMPS UP MALICIOUS ACTIVITY AGAINST CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTUREVOLT
TYPHOON RAMPS UP MALICIOUS ACTIVITY AGAINST CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The Chinese state-sponsored APT has compromised as many as 30% of Cisco legacy
routers on a SOHO botnet that multiple threat groups use.

Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer

January 11, 2024

4 Min Read
Source: NicoElNino via Shutterstock


China-backed cyber espionage group Volt Typhoon is systematically targeting
legacy Cisco devices in a sophisticated and stealthy campaign to grow its attack
infrastructure.

In many instances, the threat actor, known for targeting critical
infrastructure, is exploiting a couple of vulnerabilities from 2019 in routers,
to break into target devices and take control of them.


TARGETING US CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SECTORS

Researchers from SecurityScorecard's threat intelligence team spotted the
activity when doing some follow-up investigations on recent vendor and media
reports about Volt Typhoon breaking into US critical infrastructure
organizations and laying the ground for potential future disruptions. The
attacks have targeted water utilities, power suppliers, transportation, and
communications systems. The group's victims have included organizations in the
US, UK, and Australia.



One of the vendor reports, from Lumen, described a botnet comprised of small
office/home office (SOHO) routers that Volt Typhoon — and other Chinese threat
groups — is using as a command-and-control (C2) network in attacks against
high-value networks. The network that Lumen described in the report consists
mainly of end-of-life routers from Cisco, DrayTek, and, to a smaller extent,
Netgear.



SecurityScorecard researchers used the indicators of compromise (IoCs) that
Lumen released with its report to see if they could identify new infrastructure
associated with Volt Typhoon's campaign. The investigation showed the threat
group's activity may be more extensive than previously thought, says Rob Ames,
staff threat researcher at SecurityScorecard.



For example, Volt Typhoon appears to have been responsible for compromising as
much as 30% — or 325 of 1,116 — of end-of-life Cisco RV320/325 routers that
SecurityScorecard observed on the C2 botnet over a 37-day period. The security
vendor's researchers observed regular connections between the compromised Cisco
devices and known Volt Typhoon infrastructure between Dec. 1, 2023 and Jan. 7,
2024, suggesting a very active operation.

SecurityScorecard's digging also showed Volt Typhoon deploying "fy.sh", a
hitherto unknown Web shell on the Cisco routers and other network edge devices
that the group is currently targeting. In addition, SecurityScorecard was able
to identify multiple new IP addresses that appeared linked to Volt Typhoon
activity.



"SecurityScorecard used previously circulated IoCs linked to Volt Typhoon to
identify the newly compromised devices we observed, the previously unspecified
webshell (fy.sh), and the other IP addresses that may represent new IoCs," Ames
says.


LIVING-OFF-THE-LAND CYBERATTACKS

Volt Typhoon is a threat group that the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Agency (CISA) has identified as a state-sponsored Chinese threat actor targeting
US critical infrastructure sectors. Microsoft, the first to report on the group
back in May 2023, has described it as being active since at least May 2021,
being based in China, and conducting large-scale cyber espionage using a slew of
living-off-the-land techniques. The company has assessed the group as developing
capabilities to disrupt critical communications capabilities between the US and
Asia during potential future conflicts.

Ames says Volt Typhoon's use of compromised routers for data transfers is one
indication of the group's commitment to stealth.

"The group often routes its traffic through these devices in order to avoid
geographically based detection when targeting organizations in the same area as
the compromised routers," he says. "These organizations may be less likely to
notice malicious activity if the traffic involved appears to originate from the
area in which the organization is based."




CYBER-TARGETING OF VULNERABLE END-OF-LIFE GEAR

Volt Typhoon's targeting of end-of-life devices also makes a lot of sense from
the attacker's perspective, Ames says. There are some 35 known critical
vulnerabilities with a severity rating of at least 9 out of 10 on the CVSS scale
— including two in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog — associated
with the Cisco RV320 routers that Volt Typhoon has been targeting. Cisco stopped
issuing any bug fixes, maintenance releases, and repairs for the technology
three years ago, in January 2021. In addition to the Cisco devices, the Volt
Typhoon-linked botnet also includes compromised legacy DrayTek Vigor and Netgear
ProSafe routers.

"From the perspective of the devices themselves, they’re low-hanging fruit,"
Ames says. "Since 'end-of-life' means that the devices' producers will no longer
issue updates for them, vulnerabilities affecting them are likely to go
unaddressed, leaving the devices susceptible to compromise."

Callie Guenther, senior manager of cyber threat research at Critical Start, says
Volt Typhoon's strategic targeting of end-of-life Cisco routers, its development
of custom tools like fy.sh, and its geographical and sectoral targeting suggest
a highly sophisticated operation.

"Focusing on legacy systems is not a common tactic among threat actors,
primarily because it requires specific knowledge about older systems and their
vulnerabilities, which might not be widely known or documented," Guenther says.
"However, it is a growing trend, especially among state-sponsored actors who
have the resources and motivation to conduct extensive reconnaissance and
develop tailored exploits."

As examples, she points to multiple threat actors targeting the so-called
Ripple20 vulnerabilities in a TCP/IP stack that affected millions of legacy IoT
devices, as well as Chinese and Iranian threat groups targeting flaws in older
VPN products.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer



Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience
in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld,
where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the
publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also
covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop,
Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai
covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a
Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

See more from Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer
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