One of the zero-day flaws patched by Microsoft on Tuesday had been used for some time by a group with suspected Chinese government ties that targets technology companies, CrowdStrike’s chief executive said Tuesday.CEO Dmitri Alperovitch said his CrowdStrike has been battling with the group, which the company dubbed “Hurricane Panda,” on a daily basis since earlier this year.“They’ve been very persistent actors,” Alperovitch said in a phone interview Tuesday. “We believe with confidence they’re indeed tied to the Chinese government in their objectives.”Hurricane Panda has targeted technology infrastructure companies, Alperovitch said. He said he could not identify the companies, which use CrowdStrike’s services. CrowdStrike analysts often see attacks in action and work to boot the hackers from networks. It results in a fast-playing offense and defense, which Alperovitch said can lead to mistakes by the hackers seeking to keep their foothold.“We are able to literally record every command they try and understand immediately what they’re doing,” he said. For example, the analysts will often see hackers mistype commands, such as “hsotname” instead of “hostname” and “romote” for “remote,” as they hastily try to maintain their access.Hurricane Panda is noteworthy for using tightly written exploit code, “win64.exe,” that allowed the group to move through network systems once a computer had been hacked. That tool would be uploaded using a webshell nicknamed “ChinaChopper” that the attackers had placed on a company’s servers, Alperovitch said.Win64.exe, which runs on 64-bit Windows systems, takes advantage of a privilege escalation vulnerability, which can allow attackers to gain administrative rights to other programs from the account of a user who doesn’t have those permissions.Microsoft patched the vulnerability, CVE-2014-4113, on Tuesday, but Hurricane Panda had been using it for a while. CrowdStrike notified Microsoft of the flaw when it discovered the attackers were using it, Alperovitch said.If successfully exploited, the flaw allows arbitrary code to be run in kernel mode, allowing an attacker to install programs, view or change data or create new accounts with full administrator rights, according to a blog post from Symantec on Tuesday.Privilege escalation flaws aren’t rare, but it is uncommon to see one used for so long by a group, which indicates that the attackers have “knowledge about non-public exploitable security bugs, which usually means the exploit was either bought from a supplier or developed in-house,” Alperovitch wrote in a post on the company’s blog. Win64.exe contained an interesting embedded string of characters, “woqunimalegebi,” which translates to a Chinese swear word, Alperovitch said. The word is often misspelled in Chinese to avoid being blocked by the country’s filtering equipment, and that intentional error changes the meaning of the vulgarity to “fertile grass mud horse in the Mahler Gobi Desert,” according to CrowdStrike.Alperovitch said it’s hard to say why programmers insert such messages, but “perhaps they were trying to send a message to anyone that is reverse engineering the code.”Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk Related content news Is China waging a cyber war with Taiwan? Nation-state hacking groups based in China have sharply ramped up cyberattacks against Taiwan this year, according to multiple reports. By Gagandeep Kaur Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Cyberattacks Government news Apple patches info-stealing, zero day bugs in iPads and Macs The vulnerabilities that can allow the leaking of sensitive information and enable arbitrary code execution have had exploitations in the wild. By Shweta Sharma Dec 01, 2023 3 mins Zero-day vulnerability feature The CSO guide to top security conferences Tracking postponements, cancellations, and conferences gone virtual — CSO Online’s calendar of upcoming security conferences makes it easy to find the events that matter the most to you. By CSO Staff Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Technology Industry IT Skills Events news Conti-linked ransomware takes in $107 million in ransoms: Report A ransomware campaign linked to the ostensibly defunct Conti malware group has targeted mostly US businesses, in a costly series of attacks. By Jon Gold Nov 30, 2023 4 mins Ransomware Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe