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GhostNet

Intel Library

GhostNet

Threat actor0 reports from 0 vendors

Cyber espionage is an issue whose time has come. In this second report from the Information Warfare Monitor, we lay out the findings of a 10-month investigation of alleged Chinese cyber spying against Tibetan institutions. The investigation, consisting of fieldwork, technical scouting, and laboratory analysis, discovered a lot more. The investigation ultimately uncovered a network of over 1,295 infected hosts in 103 countries. Up to 30% of the infected hosts are considered high-value targets and include computers located at ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, news media, and NGOs. The Tibetan computer systems we manually investigated, and from which our investigations began, were conclusively compromised by multiple infections that gave attackers unprecedented access to potentially sensitive information. Attacks on the Dalai Lama’s Private Office The OHHDL started to suspect it was under surveillance while setting up meetings be-tween His Holiness and foreign dignitaries. They sent an email invitation on behalf of His Holiness to a foreign diplomat, but before they could follow it up with a courtesy telephone call, the diplomat’s office was contacted by the Chinese government and warned not to go ahead with the meeting. The Tibetans wondered whether a computer compromise might be the explanation; they called ONI Asia who called us. (Until May 2008, the first author was employed on a studentship funded by the OpenNet Initiative and the second author was a principal investigator for ONI.)

Vendor aliases (1)

The same group is tracked under different names by different vendors.

VendorName
OSINTSnooping Dragon

MITRE ATT&CK techniques (0)

No techniques mapped yet.

Indicators of compromise

No IOCs extracted yet from reports naming this actor.

Report timeline

Every report in the Global Intel Library that names GhostNet, newest first. Open any report to see the full analysis with provenance.

    No reports in the Lore library name this actor yet.

    Threat feed IOCs (0)

    Indicators from free threat feeds (abuse.ch ThreatFox, AlienVault OTX) attributed to GhostNet. Each row shows why it was linked and where it came from.

    No feed indicators linked to this actor yet. Feeds are checked every hour.

    Public research & publications (3)

    Open-source reports about this actor collected from MISP Galaxy.