A sophisticated multilingual phishing campaign has recently been uncovered targeting financial institutions and government organisations across East and Southeast Asia. The attackers use ZIP file attachments disguised as legitimate business, HR, or tax-related documents to lure victims into executing malicious content. These attachments are presented in Traditional Chinese, English, and Japanese, allowing the campaign to effectively bypass linguistic barriers and increase the likelihood of user engagement. The goal of the operation appears to be credential theft and malware deployment through carefully localised phishing lures and web-based payload delivery systems. Researchers identified 28 phishing pages divided into three distinct language clusters—12 Chinese, 12 English, and 4 Japanese—each tailored to specific regions. Despite the linguistic differences, all clusters share the same backend logic, built on PHP scripts such as visitor_log.php, download.php, and force_download.php. These scripts handle visitor tracking, download authorisation, and payload delivery. When a victim accesses one of the phishing pages, the system first logs their details (IP address, browser information) and then dynamically enables a download link that delivers the malicious ZIP file. These archives are often named with realistic document titles like “Tax Invoice List,” “Import-Export Declaration,” or “Notice of Salary System Review,” making them appear authentic and trustworthy. The phishing infrastructure is hosted primarily on servers managed by Kaopu Cloud HK Limited (AS138915), with domains distributed across Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and Hong Kong. Several IP addresses share identical SSL certificates, indicating that a single actor or group controls the entire setup. This unified infrastructure, combined with multilingual delivery, reflects a modular and scalable phishing framework designed for rapid deployment across multiple regions. By using adaptive scripts and language-specific lures, the attackers effectively increase the success rate of infections while making detection and attribution more difficult for defenders.
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