New Chinese Hacking Tool Found, Spurring US Warning To Allies

Security researchers with U.S. cybersecurity firm Symantec said they have discovered a "highly sophisticated" Chinese hacking tool that has been able to escape public attention for more than a decade. Reuters reports: The discovery was shared with the U.S. government in recent months, who have shared the information with foreign partners, said a U.S. official. Symantec, a division of chipmaker Broadcom, published its research about the tool, which it calls Daxin, on Monday. "It's something we haven't seen before," said Clayton Romans, associate director with the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). "This is the exact type of information we're hoping to receive." CISA highlighted Symantec's membership in a joint public-private cybersecurity information sharing partnership, known as the JCDC, alongside the new research paper. The JCDC, or Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, is a collective of government defense agencies, including the FBI and National Security Agency, and 22 U.S. technology companies that share intelligence about active cyberattacks with one another. Symantec's attribution to China is based on instances where components of Daxin were combined with other known, Chinese-linked computer hacker infrastructure or cyberattacks, said Vikram Thakur, a technical director with Symantec. [...] "Daxin can be controlled from anywhere in the world once a computer is actually infected," said Thakur. "That's what raises the bar from malware that we see coming out of groups operating from China."

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