southeast asia2 articles
GoSerpent Malware Has Been Quietly Raiding Southeast Asian Governments for Months
Cybersecurity researchers at Kaspersky have uncovered a previously undocumented malware called GoSerpent, which has been targeting government and diplomatic entities in Southeast Asia since late 2025 for espionage and long-term intelligence gathering. The malware connects to a command-and-control server to deploy secondary payloads capable of credential dumping, file collection, and data exfiltration, while also supporting SOCKS5 proxying to mask attackers' true IP addresses. The campaign shares similarities with the known threat actor TetrisPhantom, though definitive attribution remains uncertain, and a separate but related espionage operation by DoNot Team was also disclosed, targeting Bangladesh's military using spear-phishing emails.
1.4 Million Scam Accounts Taken Down in Southeast Asia Crackdown
In a coordinated operation called "Disruption Week," law enforcement agencies including the US Department of Justice and Royal Thai Police, alongside major tech companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and Google, dismantled scam networks operating out of Southeast Asia. The effort resulted in over 1.4 million social media and Microsoft accounts being disrupted, 63 arrests, and more than $3.8 million in cryptocurrency assets frozen. The targeted scam compounds, located in Cambodia, Laos, and Burma, had been trafficking workers under false pretenses and forcing them to carry out large-scale fraud operations against victims in the US and abroad.