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BackdoorDiplomacy is a Chinese-attributed cyberespionage threat actor that has conducted sustained operations against government organizations and strategically important telecommunications and financial entities. Its activity has been reported across Africa, including Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, and Ethiopia, and in the Middle East and other regions of Chinese strategic interest. The group has been linked to long-running intrusions against Kenyan government organizations and has been assessed as closely related to APT15. Reported overlaps also exist with activity tracked as Playful Taurus, Vixen Panda, NICKEL, Ke3chang, REF5961, Worok, and TA428, though these designations should not necessarily be treated as interchangeable. BackdoorDiplomacy uses both bespoke and acquired capabilities, including leaked offensive tools such as EternalBlue, EternalRocks, EternalSynergy, and DoublePulsar. It has exploited public-facing applications for initial access, transferred additional tools and payloads to compromised systems, performed network and removable-media discovery, and assessed systems for EternalBlue exposure with SMBTouch. The actor uses DLL search-order hijacking and DLL side-loading, including legitimate software to load malicious DLLs. It also masquerades implants within directories named for legitimate software, stages files of interest in inconspicuous locations, and applies VMProtect obfuscation to tools and malware. These operations are consistent with intelligence collection and long-term access objectives.
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.
42 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
11 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
6 additional families tracked in Mallory.
9 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 9 of them exploited in the wild.
BackdoorDiplomacy has exploited CVE-2020-5902, an F5 BIP-IP vulnerability, to drop a Linux backdoor.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
The following analytic detects attempts to exploit CVE-2022-26134, an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Confluence... This activity is significant as it allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the Confluence server without authentication, potentially leading to full system compromise.
4 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
19 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.
Listed in the detection's APT annotations.
Listed in detection annotations as associated with T1190; no further details provided.
Listed as an associated threat actor in the detection annotation for exploitation of the public-facing PTC Windchill vulnerability CVE-2026-4681.
Listed as a threat actor associated with the PowerShell P/Invoke process injection API chain detection and related ATT&CK techniques.
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.