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TA428, also known as Colourful Panda and BRONZE DUDLEY, is a China-linked advanced persistent threat actor conducting cyberespionage against government, defense, aviation, and research organizations. Its targeting is concentrated in East Asia, with documented attacks against organizations in Mongolia and Russia. Its malware arsenal includes Poison Ivy, Cotx RAT, Tmanger, nccTrojan (also known as MsmRAT), and SManager (also known as PhantomNet). TA428's Operation LagTime IT was observed from at least March 2019 and continued through 2020. The campaign used spearphishing with Royal Road-generated RTF documents exploiting Microsoft Equation Editor vulnerability CVE-2018-0798. Initial payloads established persistence through malicious Microsoft Word add-ins and deployed Poison Ivy and Cotx RAT. Subsequent activity included Outlook credential theft, credential extraction from LSASS, network discovery with NBTScan, scanning for MS17-010 exposure, and EternalBlue exploitation for lateral movement. The actor has also used Windows Management Instrumentation for authenticated remote command execution and host reconnaissance. TA428 uses legitimate applications for DLL side-loading and injects payloads into remote processes. Follow-on malware establishes persistence through Windows services and registry autorun mechanisms. Its remote-access tooling supports shell and PowerShell execution, system and process enumeration, bidirectional file transfer, document exfiltration, keylogging, and screen capture. Encrypted command-and-control traffic, packed payloads, and services masquerading as legitimate Windows components support concealment. Shared tooling and technical overlaps with other China-linked intrusion sets do not establish that those groups are aliases or subgroups of TA428.
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.
47 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
25 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
20 additional families tracked in Mallory.
4 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 4 of them exploited in the wild.
This RTF file contains malicious code for exploiting CVE-2018-0798 and an object called ‘8.t’. The inclusion of these objects suggests that it was created using the Royal Road RTF Weaponizer.
‘s.exe’ contains an executable file called ‘s.exe’. This is a checker to investigate whether it can be compromised by exploiting MS17-010 against the host passed as an argument... ‘w.exe’ is a tool that actually exploits MS17-010.
RoyalRoad is a tool that generates weaponized RTF documents that exploit the following vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Equation Editor: CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798 and CVE-2018-0802.
Royal Road is a tool that generates RTF files that exploit the Microsoft Office Equation Editor vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798, CVE-2018-0802).
185 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Referenced Chinese threat actor previously attributed with PhantomNet malware that overlaps with tooling seen in Cluster Alpha.
Chinese-linked espionage actor referenced due to attribution overlaps with Cluster Alpha malware including PhantomNet/DOWNTOWN and possible ties to Worok.
Referenced as a group previously associated with deploying ValleyRAT and targeting government, technology, defense, and critical infrastructure entities in China; not directly attributed as the actor behind this specific campaign.
Previously assessed as a possible user of EAGERBEE in attacks targeting Japanese organizations.
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.