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Naikon, also known as Naikon APT and Naikon Team, is a Chinese-speaking, China-linked cyber-espionage threat actor active since at least 2010. It has primarily targeted government, military, intelligence, law-enforcement, executive, and legislative organizations in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea region. Naikon operations have used spearphishing attachments for delivery, DLL side-loading and search-order hijacking to execute payloads through legitimate applications, Registry Run-key persistence, scheduled tasks, masquerading, process injection, network and host reconnaissance, credential dumping, lateral movement, and keylogging. Naikon malware includes the Aria-Body (AR) in-memory DLL backdoor lineage, RainyDay (also known as FoundCore), and Nebulae. AR supports remote access, system and network discovery, file and process operations, shell access, HTTP communications, persistence functions, and later versions added raw-input keylogging. RainyDay has been used to deploy follow-on tools, perform reconnaissance, support credential theft and lateral movement, manipulate services, capture screenshots, and transfer files. Nebulae has functioned as a side-loaded persistence and backup-access backdoor, with system-information collection, file and process management, payload download, and command execution capabilities. Naikon has also been associated with intrusions into telecommunications environments in ASEAN countries, where operators targeted high-value infrastructure and credential material to support intelligence collection.
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.
50 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
10 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
5 additional families tracked in Mallory.
2 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 2 of them exploited in the wild.
This detection identifies instances where Windows Explorer.exe spawns PowerShell or cmd.exe processes, particularly focusing on executions initiated by LNK files. This behavior is associated with the ZDI-CAN-25373 Windows shortcut zero-day vulnerability, where specially crafted LNK files are used to trigger malicious code execution through cmd.exe or powershell.exe. This technique has been actively exploited by multiple APT groups in targeted attacks through both HTTP and SMB delivery methods.
The Naikon group used mostly spear-phished documents for the attacks, with CVE-2012-0158 exploits that dropped the group’s signature backdoor.
49 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.
Naikon is listed in the detection's threat-actor annotations.
Listed in the detection's APT annotations.
Listed as an associated threat actor in detection annotations for Ghostscript exploitation; no specific campaign activity is described in this reference.
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.