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Earth Longzhi is a China-linked advanced persistent threat group tracked as a subgroup of APT41 and active since at least 2020. Its operations target government, healthcare, academic, banking, insurance, defense, aviation, infrastructure, and urban development organizations. Documented campaigns have affected Taiwan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ukraine. The group is also labeled Earth Longzhi APT and Earth Longzhi (APT41 sub-cluster). Earth Longzhi obtains initial access primarily through spear-phishing, including password-protected archives and download links, and also exploits publicly exposed applications. Its toolset centers on customized Cobalt Strike loaders, including Symatic, CroxLoader, BigpipeLoader, MultiPipeLoader, and OutLoader. These loaders employ encrypted payloads, named-pipe-based decryption, process injection, DLL sideloading, parent-process masquerading, and removal of user-mode security hooks. The group has used Fastly CDN infrastructure to conceal its underlying command-and-control servers. Post-exploitation tooling supports network and drive reconnaissance, port and password scanning, proxying, SQL command execution, and privilege escalation. Earth Longzhi uses PrintNightmare and PrintSpoofer and has implemented selected Mimikatz functions as standalone tools for credential dumping, DCSync, browser credential recovery, and credential interception. Its ProcBurner and AVBurner tools abuse a vulnerable signed driver associated with CVE-2019-16098 to terminate protected security processes and remove antivirus or EDR callbacks. Additional techniques include Windows UAC bypass through IElevatedFactoryServer and persistence through high-privilege scheduled tasks disguised as legitimate update activity. Its association with APT41 is supported by shared Cobalt Strike metadata, loader-code similarities, victimology, and overlapping tradecraft.
Mallory correlates actor tradecraft and target patterns against your stack, your sector, and your geography. See overlap before they land.
Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
21 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt.
13 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
8 additional families tracked in Mallory.
2 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 2 of them exploited in the wild.
RTCore64.sys is a component of Afterburner. In 2019, this driver was assigned as CVE-2019-16098, which allows authenticated users to read/write any arbitrary address including kernel space. However, the outdated version of vulnerable driver still has a valid signature. As a result, the attacker can deliver the outdated version of the driver into the victim machine and abuse it for various purposes, such as for anti-antivirus or anti-EDR.
During the investigation of the second campaign, we collected multiple hacking tools used for privilege escalation (PrintNightmare and PrintSpoofer), credential dumping (custom standalone Mimikatz), and defense evasion (disablement of security products).
7 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
12 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Referenced as a previously reported subgroup whose domain naming pattern matched infrastructure seen in Cluster Charlie activity.
Chinese subgroup of APT41 referenced because Cluster Charlie infrastructure overlaps with Earth Longzhi C2 IPs and speedtest-themed domain patterns.
Referenced as a previously reported subgroup whose domain naming pattern overlaps with infrastructure used in Cluster Charlie activity.
Mentioned as an APT41-related group monitored by the researchers. No specific operations or involvement in the investigated campaign are attributed to it.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.