Glossary: APT31 - a name given to an attack group that is attributed to China. Equation Group - a name given to an APT group which is believed to be the Tailo

Glossary: APT31 - a name given to an attack group that is attributed to China. Equation Group - a name given to an APT group which is believed to be the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit of the NSA. The unit is now named "Computer Network Operations" (CNO). Jian - a name that was given to a 0-Day exploit that was attributed to the Chinese-affiliated attack group. 0-Day - a vulnerability that is unknown to the public or to the relevant vendor (e.g Microsoft). 0-Day Exploit - an exploit that is directed at a zero-day --- In this story, we claim that the Chinese APT acquired the Equation Group exploit somewhere around 2014, cloned it into their own version (Jian), and used it until was finally caught in 2017. Interestingly, the 0-Day was reported to Microsoft by Lockheed Martin's Incident Response team. This might suggest that the Chinese APT might have used it to attack American targets. I tried to summarize the highlights in a less technical lingo in a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/megabeets_/status/1363807746815066113 https://twitter.com/megabeets_/status/1363807746815066113