{"id":19965,"date":"2024-02-01T08:26:05","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T02:56:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=19965"},"modified":"2025-04-05T21:08:26","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T15:38:26","slug":"volt-typhoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/volt-typhoon\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a Volt Typhoon?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>About Volt Typhoon<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>It is a\u00a0state-sponsored hacking group based in China that has been active since at least 2021.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The group typically focuses on\u00a0espionage and information gathering.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>It has\u00a0targeted critical infrastructure organizations\u00a0in the US, including Guam.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>To achieve their objective, the threat actor\u00a0puts strong emphasis on stealth, relying almost exclusively on\u00a0living-off-the-land techniques and\u00a0hands-on-keyboard activity.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The recurring attack pattern of Volt Typhoon\u00a0begins with initial access via exploitation of public-facing devices\u00a0or services.<\/li>\n<li>Volt Typhoon\u00a0employs the\u00a0comparatively\u00a0uncommon practice of leveraging preinstalled utilities for most of their\u00a0victim interactions.<\/li>\n<li>Compromised\u00a0small office\/home office (SOHO)\u00a0devices are used by the attackers\u00a0to proxy communications to and from the affected networks.<\/li>\n<li>They\u00a0issue commands via the command line to (1)\u00a0collect data, including credentials from local and network systems: (2) put the data into an archive file to stage it for exfiltration: and then (3)\u00a0use the stolen valid credentials to maintain persistence.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Volt Typhoon was a particularly quiet operator that\u00a0hid its traffic by routing it through hacked network equipment,\u00a0like home routers, and carefully expunging evidence of intrusions from the victim\u2019s logs.<\/li>\n<li>This combination of behaviors makes\u00a0detection especially difficult, as defenders must be able to differentiate between attacker activities and those of power users or administrative staff.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1) What is a router?<\/h3>\n<p>A router is a physical or virtual appliance that passes information between two or more packet-switched computer networks. A router inspects a given data packet&#8217;s destination IP address, calculates the best way for it to reach its destination and then forwards it accordingly.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2024\/01\/31\/fbi-shut-down-china-volt-typhoon-hackers-targeting-us-.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>FBI shuts down China\u2019s \u2018Volt Typhoon\u2019 hackers targeting U.S. infrastructure<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Volt Typhoon is a state-sponsored hacking group based in China that has been active since at least 2021. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":19966,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-19965","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}