Operation GriefLure: Dissecting an APT Campaign Targeting Vietnam's Military Telecom & Philippine Healthcare

A sophisticated spear phishing campaign dubbed Operation GriefLure targeted senior executives of Viettel Group, Vietnam's largest military-owned telecommunications provider, and St. Luke's Medical Center in the Philippines. The operation weaponized authentic legal documents from a genuine data breach dispute involving a Vietnamese citizen and Viettel, alongside fabricated whistleblower complaints targeting Philippine healthcare administrators. Attackers delivered malicious Windows LNK files within nested RAR archives, abusing native ftp.exe as a Living-off-the-Land dropper. Upon execution, the payload assembled polymorphic implants directly on disk from chunked .doc files, establishing persistence while displaying legitimate decoy PDFs. The malware enabled remote access through process injection, credential harvesting from browsers and remote access tools, screenshot capture, and file exfiltration via HTTPS C2 communication to infrastructure hosted on bulletproof Hong Kong servers.

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