VERY IMPORTANT

This paper documents attempted exploitation activity aimed at Uyghur interests outside of China. Exploitation is being attempted via the usual tactic of spear phishing containing malicious attachments to targets. The exploit code attached used for dropping the malware is older – CVE-2012-0158 – and from our vantage point, we have no indication of successful or failed exploitation. Nonetheless, we can obtain targeting information and insight into tactics from the spearphish messages used by the threat actors. Successful exploitation typically results in malware calling back to one or more Uyghur themed domain names. The malware payloads observed to be associated with the Uyghur themed C2 domains so far consist of PlugX, Gh0st RAT, and Saker/Xbox, although there may be others that are yet to be discovered.