#microsoft

A fresh wave of attacks on APAC government entities involves both self-propagating malware spreading via removable drives and a spear-phishing campaign.

A trio of threat activity clusters linked to China has been observed compromising more government organizations in Southeast Asia as part of a renewed state-sponsored operation codenamed Crimson Palace, indicating an expansion in the scope of the espionage effort. Cybersecurity firm Sophos, which has been monitoring the cyber offensive, said it comprises three intrusion sets tracked as Cluster

The threat actor tracked as Mustang Panda has refined its malware arsenal to include new tools in order to facilitate data exfiltration and the deployment of next-stage payloads, according to new findings from Trend Micro. The cybersecurity firm, which is monitoring the activity cluster under the name Earth Preta, said it observed "the propagation of PUBLOAD via a variant of the worm HIUPAN."

**According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?** The user would have to navigate to a page with malicious content to be compromised by the attacker.

**According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?** This attack requires a admin user on the client to connect to a malicious server and then take specific actions which could result in information disclosure.

**According to the CVSS metrics, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could lead to major loss of confidentiality (C:H), integrity (I:H) and availability (A:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** The attacker can execute arbitrary Desktop Flows scripts in the target user session by registering the machine to their own malicious Entra tenant, extracting the user's Sid, and creating a malicious AD domain with the same Sid. This allows them to mint valid Entra ID tokens that the attacked machine will trust to run desktop automation in the session of the user with the matching Sid.

**Is there any action I need to take to be protected from this vulnerability?** If you have enabled automatic updates, you will automatically receive the update as soon as it is available. If you have not enabled automatic updates, you will need to update the product manually. Please see Update Network Watcher extension to the latest version - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Learn for more information.

**Why are there no links to an update or instructions with steps that must be taken to protect from this vulnerability?** This vulnerability has already been fully mitigated by Microsoft. There is no action for users of this service to take. This purpose of this CVE is to provide further transparency. Please see Toward greater transparency: Unveiling Cloud Service CVEs for more information.

**Is there any action I need to take to be protected from this vulnerability?** If you have enabled automatic updates, you will automatically receive the update as soon as it is available. If you have not enabled automatic updates, you will need to update the product manually. Please see Update Network Watcher extension to the latest version - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Learn for more information.

**According to the CVSS metric, privileges required is low (PR:L). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an authenticated attacker to leverage SQL Server Native Scoring to apply pre-trained models to their data without moving it out of the database.