The China-linked risk actor behind the current in-the-wild exploitation of a important 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 risk actor primarily targets the SQL injection vulnerabilities found on net functions to entry the SQL servers of focused organizations,” Pattern Micro safety researcher Joseph C Chen mentioned in an evaluation printed this week. “The actor additionally takes benefit of varied recognized vulnerabilities to use public-facing servers.”
A few of the different outstanding 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 some extent of overlap with risk 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 reminiscent of Fscan and Kscan; and bonafide applications like wevtutil.exe to wash 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 information, 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 making an attempt to delete the binaries after being deployed,” Sophos famous in an evaluation printed 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 use CVE-2025-31324, a important unauthenticated file add vulnerability in SAP NetWeaver to ascertain a reverse shell to infrastructure below its management.
In addition to CVE-2025-31324, the hacking crew is alleged to have weaponized as many as eight completely different vulnerabilities to breach public-facing servers –
Describing it as “extremely lively,” Pattern Micro famous that the risk actor has shifted its focus from monetary providers to logistics and on-line retail, and most lately, to IT corporations, universities, and authorities organizations.
“In early 2024 and prior, we noticed that almost all 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. Lately, 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 through DLL side-loading, an strategy extensively 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 features.
Pattern Micro mentioned it noticed in March 2025 an up to date model of the backdoor that adjustments the command-and-control (C2) communication technique from TCP to WebSocket, indicating lively ongoing improvement of the malware.
“Earth Lamia is conducting its operations throughout a number of international locations and industries with aggressive intentions,” it concluded. “On the similar time, the risk actor repeatedly refines their assault techniques by growing customized hacking instruments and new backdoors.”
