Student sells government, university sites to Chinese actors

Asian threat actors have been purchasing access to misconfigured websites belonging to often high-value organizations for chump change.

Forget Cyber Monday at Target: a college student in Bangladesh has been doling out the cyber deal of the century for a year and a half now. Researchers at Cyderes’ Howler Cell recently communicated with an individual who claims to be a college student in Bangladesh, with aspirations to one day be a red team cyber defender, and has been funding his education by selling access to vulnerable websites on Telegram for three or four dollars a pop. For websites belonging to large, even globally recognized universities, law enforcement bodies, military organizations, courts, attorneys general, etc., just $200.

It hints at a bigger picture: that while many of this hacker’s customers are, indubitably, financially motivated, some appear to be after something greater: espionage. As further evidence to the point, a subset of buyers has been using the cheap sites to deploy a sophisticated and long-undetected command-and-control (C2) tool called “Beima.”

Read more at Dark Reading