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Chinese TA415 Abuses VS Code Remote Tunnel for Espionage

🔒 Proofpoint reported that a China-aligned threat actor tracked as TA415 conducted spear-phishing in July–August 2025, impersonating U.S. policy officials and the U.S.-China Business Council to target government, think tank, and academic personnel focused on trade and economic policy. The messages delivered password-protected archives on public cloud services that contained a Windows shortcut which executed a hidden batch script and an obfuscated Python loader named WhirlCoil while displaying a decoy PDF. The loader establishes a VS Code Remote Tunnel to enable persistent backdoor access, harvests system and user data, exfiltrates it via base64-encoded HTTP posts to free request-logging services, and establishes scheduled tasks (e.g., GoogleUpdate) for persistence.