Cyber Risks · Volexity Blog

Ocean Lotus: Extending Cyber Espionage Operations Through Fake Websites

Summary: Volexity identified multiple OceanLotus campaigns using fake Vietnamese-language news websites and Facebook pages, some with over 10,000 scraped articles, that profile visitors and deliver malware for Windows, OSX, and Android. On one baomoivietnam.com article, malicious JavaScript served a fake Flash Player update that downloaded a RAR archive containing a legitimate Google updater executable and a hidden malicious goopdate.dll, which loaded a Cobalt Strike stager into memory via search order hijacking.

Why it matters: The payload relied on a legitimate signed Google updater and a hidden DLL to slip past users who saw only a single executable, and the same sites served phishing links to iOS and Android visitors through Dropbox, Amazon S3, and Google Drive.

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Detection & Response
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