HUNTING THE SHADOWS: IN DEPTH ANALYSIS OF ESCALATED APT ATTACKS

APT attacks are a new emerging threat and have made headlines in recent years. However, we have yet to see full-scale assessment of targeted attack operations. Taiwan has been a long term target for these cyber-attacks due to its highly developed network infrastructure and sensitive political position. We had a unique chance to monitor, detect, investigate, and mitigate a large number of attacks on government and private sector companies. This presentation will introduce our results of a joint research between Xecure-Lab and Academia Sinica on targeted attack operations across the Taiwan Strait. We have developed a fully automated system, XecScan 2.0 (http://scan.xecure-lab.com) equipped with unique dynamic (sandbox) and static malicious software forensics technology to analyze nature and behavior of malicious binaries and document exploits. The system performs real-time APT classification and associates the analyzed content with existing knowledge base. In our experiments, the XecScan system has analyzed and successfully identified more than 12,000 APT emails, which include APT Malware and Document Exploits. With this presentation we will also analyze and group the samples from the recent Mandiant APT1(61398) Report and will compare the relationships between APT1 samples to the samples discovered in Taiwan and discuss the history behind APT1 Hacker activities. During this presentation we will release a free, publicly accessible portal to our collaborative APT classification platform and access to the XecScan 2.0 APIs.

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