The China-linked menace actor behind the latest in-the-wild exploitation of a vital safety flaw in SAP NetWeaver has been attributed to a broader set of assaults focusing on organizations in Brazil, India, and Southeast Asia since 2023.
“The menace actor primarily targets the SQL injection vulnerabilities found on internet purposes to entry the SQL servers of focused organizations,” Development Micro safety researcher Joseph C Chen mentioned in an evaluation revealed this week. “The actor additionally takes benefit of assorted identified vulnerabilities to take advantage of public-facing servers.”
Among the different distinguished targets of the adversarial collective embody Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The cybersecurity firm is monitoring the exercise below the moniker Earth Lamia, stating the exercise shares a point of overlap with menace clusters documented by Elastic Safety Labs as REF0657, Sophos as STAC6451, and Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 as CL-STA-0048.
Every of those assaults has focused organizations spanning a number of sectors in South Asia, usually leveraging internet-exposed Microsoft SQL Servers and different cases to conduct reconnaissance, deploy post-exploitation instruments like Cobalt Strike and Supershell, and set up proxy tunnels to the sufferer networks utilizing Rakshasa and Stowaway.
Additionally used are privilege escalation instruments like GodPotato and JuicyPotato; community scanning utilities comparable to Fscan and Kscan; and legit applications like wevtutil.exe to scrub Home windows Utility, System, and Safety occasion logs.
Choose intrusions aimed toward Indian entities have additionally tried to deploy Mimic ransomware binaries to encrypt sufferer recordsdata, though the efforts have been largely unsuccessful.
“Whereas the actors have been seen staging the Mimic ransomware binaries in all noticed incidents, the ransomware usually didn’t efficiently execute, and in a number of cases, the actors have been seen trying to delete the binaries after being deployed,” Sophos famous in an evaluation revealed in August 2024.
Then earlier this month, EclecticIQ disclosed that CL-STA-0048 was one among the many many China-nexus cyber espionage teams to take advantage of CVE-2025-31324, a vital unauthenticated file add vulnerability in SAP NetWeaver to ascertain a reverse shell to infrastructure below its management.
Moreover CVE-2025-31324, the hacking crew is claimed to have weaponized as many as eight completely different vulnerabilities to breach public-facing servers –
Describing it as “extremely energetic,” Development Micro famous that the menace actor has shifted its focus from monetary companies to logistics and on-line retail, and most just lately, to IT corporations, universities, and authorities organizations.
“In early 2024 and prior, we noticed that the majority of their targets have been organizations inside the monetary trade, particularly associated to securities and brokerage,” the corporate mentioned. “Within the second half of 2024, they shifted their targets to organizations primarily within the logistics and on-line retail industries. Not too long ago, we observed that their targets have shifted once more to IT corporations, universities, and authorities organizations.”
A noteworthy method adopted by Earth Lamia is to launch its customized backdoors like PULSEPACK by way of DLL side-loading, an strategy broadly embraced by Chinese language hacking teams. A modular .NET-based implant, PULSEPACK communicates with a distant server to retrieve varied plugins to hold out its capabilities.
Development Micro mentioned it noticed in March 2025 an up to date model of the backdoor that adjustments the command-and-control (C2) communication methodology from TCP to WebSocket, indicating energetic ongoing improvement of the malware.
“Earth Lamia is conducting its operations throughout a number of nations and industries with aggressive intentions,” it concluded. “On the identical time, the menace actor repeatedly refines their assault ways by creating customized hacking instruments and new backdoors.”
