Summary Alerts for us-cert.cisa.gov
NSA, CISA, and FBI have observed increasingly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored cyber activity targeting U.S. political, economic, military, educational, and CI personnel and organizations. NSA, CISA, and FBI have identified the following trends in Chinese state-sponsored malicious cyber operations through proactive and retrospective analysis:
- Acquisition of Infrastructure and Capabilities. Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors remain agile and cognizant of the information security community’s practices. These actors take effort to mask their activities by using a revolving series of virtual private servers (VPSs) and common open-source or commercial penetration tools.
- Exploitation of Public Vulnerabilities. Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors consistently scan target networks for critical and high vulnerabilities within days of the vulnerability’s public disclosure. In many cases, these cyber actors seek to exploit vulnerabilities in major applications, such as Pulse Secure, Apache, F5 Big-IP, and Microsoft products. For information on Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) known to be exploited by malicious Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors, see:
- CISA-FBI Joint CSA AA20-133A: Top 10 Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities,
- CISA Activity Alert: AA20-275A: Potential for China Cyber Response to Heightened U.S.-China Tensions, and
- NSA CSA U/OO/179811-20: Chinese State-Sponsored Actors Exploit Publicly Known Vulnerabilities.
- Encrypted Multi-Hop Proxies. Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been routinely observed using a VPS as an encrypted proxy. The cyber actors use the VPS as well as small office and home office (SOHO) devices as operational nodes to evade detection.