Information about Dropping Elephant – aggressive cyber-espionage in the Asian region

Dropping Elephant (also known as “Chinastrats” and “Patchwork“) is a relatively new threat actor that is targeting a variety of high profile diplomatic and economic targets using a custom set of attack tools. Its victims are all involved with China’s foreign relations in some way, and are generally caught through spear-phishing or watering hole attacks.
Overall, the activities of this actor show that low investment and ready-made offensive toolsets can be very effective when combined with high quality social engineering. We have seen more such open source toolset dependency with meterpreter and BeEF, and expect to see this trend continue.