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BlackTech is a China-based cyber-espionage threat actor, routinely associated with Chinese security services but not publicly attributed to them. It is also known as Canary Typhoon, Circuit Panda, Palmerworm, Huapi, Radio Panda, Temp.Overboard, and Red Djinn. The group has operated since at least 2010 and has conducted sustained espionage campaigns against organizations in East Asia, particularly Taiwan and Japan, with additional targeting of Hong Kong, China, and the United States. Its victims include government agencies and contractors, defense organizations, technology, semiconductor and electronics firms, financial-services organizations, media and telecommunications companies, manufacturers, and managed-service providers. BlackTech conducts targeted initial access through spearphishing with malicious documents and password-protected archives, exploitation of public-facing network devices and enterprise software, and compromise of supply-chain or managed-service-provider environments. It has exploited vulnerabilities in routers, VPN infrastructure, web applications, and other exposed services. The actor uses DLL side-loading and search-order hijacking, including the use of legitimate signed executables, to execute payloads and evade defenses. It has also deployed malicious VPN software and scheduled tasks to preserve access. BlackTech's malware ecosystem includes PLEAD/TSCookie, Waterbear, BIFROSE/Bifrost, KIVARS, XBOW, Gh0stTimes, Flagpro, BTSDoor, Consock, and dbgPrint. Its Windows and Linux tooling supports victim profiling, system and account discovery, remote shell access, file operations, proxying and port forwarding, payload download and execution, credential theft, keylogging, and document exfiltration. Waterbear has been used as a modular secondary backdoor and has employed process injection, encrypted payloads, and anti-analysis techniques. Flagpro acts as an early-stage downloader that profiles systems, obtains stored credentials, executes commands, and selectively retrieves second-stage implants. The actor has also developed Unix and Linux variants of PLEAD and Bifrose, demonstrating cross-platform operational capability. BlackTech campaigns commonly seek sensitive government, defense, foreign-affairs, budgetary, contractual, semiconductor, and technical information. The group has reused infrastructure and malware across the PLEAD, Shrouded Crossbow, and Waterbear activity clusters, which are assessed as connected BlackTech operations.
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.
60 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
35 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
30 additional families tracked in Mallory.
18 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 18 of them exploited in the wild.
We’ve also seen PLEAD use exploits for these vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-5119, patched by Adobe last July, 2015 ... PLEAD also dabbled with a short-lived, fileless version of their malware when it obtained an exploit for a Flash vulnerability (CVE-2015-5119) that was leaked during the Hacking Team breach
PLEAD also uses CVE-2017-7269, a buffer overflow vulnerability Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 to compromise the victim’s server. This is another way for them to establish a new C&C or HTTP server.
We’ve also seen PLEAD use exploits for these vulnerabilities: ... CVE-2012-0158, patched by Microsoft last April, 2012
We’ve also seen PLEAD use exploits for these vulnerabilities: ... CVE-2014-6352, patched by Microsoft last October, 2014
We’ve also seen PLEAD use exploits for these vulnerabilities: ... CVE-2017-0199, patched by Microsoft last April, 2017
13 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
458 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.
BlackTech is listed in the detection's threat-actor annotations.
Listed in the detection's APT annotations.
Conducting cyberespionage-focused post-compromise operations against organizations in Japan using a Linux variant of BlueShell for remote command execution, file transfer, shell access, SOCKS5 proxying, and stealthy persistence/evasion after SSH-based lateral movement.
Listed incidentally in detection metadata for ATT&CK T1190.
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.