SilkParasite espionage campaign targets Central Asian government bodies

Researchers at Bitdefender Labs reported a previously undocumented cyber-espionage operation, SilkParasite, targeting government bodies in Central Asia. The campaign uses seven remote-access-tool families, including five not previously documented, and begins with password-protected archives and malicious Office documents delivered through likely spear-phishing emails. Bitdefender assesses the cluster as China-nexus with medium confidence and observed roughly 65 DriveSilkRAT infections, mostly in Asia. The implants use DLL sideloading and plugin-based architectures, including cloud-service command-and-control in one case.