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BackdoorDiplomacy is a China-aligned cyberespionage threat actor assessed to operate in support of Chinese state interests. Active for several years, it has targeted government entities and high-priority telecommunications and financial organizations, particularly in Africa, while also maintaining activity in the Middle East and other regions of Chinese strategic interest. Documented African targeting includes South Africa, Kenya, Senegal, and Ethiopia. The actor conducts post-compromise reconnaissance, including discovery of removable media, and has obtained tools for host and network discovery and lateral movement. It has downloaded additional tools and payloads onto compromised hosts, used leaked offensive malware including DoublePulsar and EternalBlue-related tools, and employed DLL search-order hijacking and DLL side-loading by pairing legitimate software with malicious DLLs. BackdoorDiplomacy has also disguised implants within directories named for legitimate software and used VMProtect to obfuscate malware and tooling. Reporting has identified operational and technical overlaps with Chinese threat activity variously tracked as APT15, Playful Taurus, Vixen Panda, NICKEL, Ke3chang, REF5961, Worok, and TA428; these names should not be treated as confirmed aliases of a single actor.
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 annotation metadata.
Listed only as an annotation associated with the detection.
BackdoorDiplomacy is listed in the detection's threat-actor annotations.
Listed only in the detection's ATT&CK/actor annotations.
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.