OctLurk and SilkLurk: newly identified tailored backdoors in cyber-espionage campaign in Central Asia

Sicherheitsmeldung mit Schweregrad noch nicht bewertet. Technische Details im Tab „Originaltext“; empfohlene Schritte in der Checkliste.

Originaltext der Quelle (nicht übersetzt) – die deutsche Zusammenfassung findest du im Tab „Kurzfassung".

Introduction We have been tracking two new backdoors, OctLurk and SilkLurk, observed in attacks against government organizations primarily in Central Asia since January 2025. Identified victims are located in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Syrian Arab Republic. These organizations operate across several sectors, including healthcare, research, government offices, ministries of foreign affairs, logistics, law‑enforcement agencies, urban planning and facilities management, and public educational establishments. The backdoor loaders are customized for each victim and use information from the victim’s machine to decrypt the payload. Both the loaders and the backdoors are heavily obfuscated, making analysis more complicated. OctLurk and SilkLurk can download and inject additional plugins to perform further malicious actions, including launching command shells, performing file system activity, synthesizing keyboard and mouse events, network scanning, credential dumping, keylogging, password theft from browsers, email collection, and remote access. Furthermore, the attackers deployed a specialized utility we named LurkProxy, which we also cover in this report. While it has a highly similar architecture to the OctLurk backdoor, it is not a backdoor itself. Our investigation shows that the same threat actor operates both SilkLurk and OctLurk , and some victims infected with SilkLurk also contain OctLurk. We assess with medium confidence that the same actor is behind both backdoors, and that they are Chinese‑speaking. However, at the time of …

Vollständiger Originalartikel ↗

• Betroffenheit im eigenen Stack prüfen: Versionen/Komponenten abgleichen.
• Originalquelle / Hersteller-Advisory lesen: https://securelist.com/octlurk-silklurk-backdoors-central-asia/120840/
• Verfügbaren Patch oder Workaround einspielen und dokumentieren.