A threat actor with ties to China has been attributed to a five-month-long intrusion targeting a Russian IT service provider, marking the hacking group’s expansion to the country beyond Southeast Asia and South America.
The activity, which took place from January to May 2025, has been attributed by Broadcom-owned Symantec to a threat actor it tracks as Jewelbug, which it said overlaps with clusters known as CL-STA-0049 (Palo Alto Networks Unit 42), Earth Alux (Trend Micro), and REF7707 (Elastic Security Labs).
The findings suggest Russia is not off-limits for Chinese cyber espionage operations despite increased “military, economic, and diplomatic” relations between Moscow and Beijing over the years.
“Attackers had access to code repositories and software build systems that they could potentially leverage to carry out supply chain attacks targeting the company’s customers in Russia,” the Symantec Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. “Notably too, the attackers were exfiltrating data to Yandex Cloud.”
Earth Alux is assessed to be active since at least the second quarter of 2023, with attacks primarily targeting government, technology, logistics, manufacturing, telecommunications, IT services, and retail in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Latin American (LATAM) regions to deliver malware like VARGEIT and COBEACON (aka Cobalt Strike Beacon).
The attacks mounted by CL-STA-0049/REF7707, on the other hand, have been observed distributing an advanced backdoor named FINALDRAFT (aka Squidoor) that’s capable of infecting both Windows and Linux systems. The findings from Symantec mark the first time these two activity clusters have been tied together.
In the attack aimed at the Russian IT service provider, Jewelbug is said to have leveraged a renamed version of Microsoft Console Debugger (“cdb.exe”), which can be used to run shellcode and bypass application allowlisting, as well as launch executables, run DLLs, and terminate security solutions.
The threat actor has also been observed dumping credentials, establishing persistence via scheduled tasks, and attempting to conceal traces of their activity by clearing Windows Event Logs.
The targeting of IT service providers is strategic as it opens the door to possible supply chain attacks, enabling threat actors to leverage the compromise to breach several downstream customers at once through malicious software updates.
Furthermore, Jewelbug has also been linked to an intrusion at a large South American government organization in July 2025, deploying a previously undocumented backdoor that’s said to be under development – underscoring the group’s evolving capabilities. The malware uses Microsoft Graph API and OneDrive for command-and-control (C2), and can collect system information, enumerate files from targeted machines, and upload the information to OneDrive.
The use of Microsoft Graph API allows the threat actor to blend in with normal network traffic and leaves minimal forensic artifacts, complicating post-incident analysis and prolonging dwell time for threat actors.
Other targets include an IT provider based in South Asia and a Taiwanese company in October and November 2024, with the attack on the latter leveraging DLL side-loading techniques to drop malicious payloads, including ShadowPad, a backdoor exclusively used by Chinese hacking groups.
The infection chain is also characterized by the deployment of the KillAV tool to disable security software and a publicly available tool named EchoDrv, which permits abuse of the kernel read/write vulnerability in the ECHOAC anti-cheat driver, as part of what appears to be a bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) attack.
Also leveraged were LSASS and Mimikatz for dumping credentials, freely available tools like PrintNotifyPotato, Coerced Potato, and Sweet Potato for discovery and privilege escalation, and a SOCKS tunneling utility dubbed EarthWorm that has been used by Chinese hacking crews like Gelsemium and Lucky Mouse.
“Jewelbug’s preference for using cloud services and other legitimate tools in its operations indicates that remaining under the radar and establishing a stealthy and persistent presence on victim networks is of utmost importance to this group,” Symantec said.
The disclosure comes as Taiwan’s National Security Bureau warned of a rise in Chinese cyber attacks targeting its government departments, and called out Beijing’s “online troll army” for attempting to disseminate fabricated content across social networks and undermine people’s trust in the government and sow distrust in the U.S., Reuters reported.
