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Naikon is a long-running Chinese-speaking cyber-espionage threat actor active since at least 2010 and primarily focused on Southeast Asia and the South China Sea region. The group is widely associated with China and is known for targeting government, military, intelligence, law-enforcement, executive, legislative, and other high-profile public-sector organizations, as well as telecommunications providers. Reported victim countries include the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, with broader activity across ASEAN. Naikon is known for spearphishing-based initial access, including malicious email attachments and user-execution lures, and for sustained post-compromise operations oriented toward intelligence collection. The group has repeatedly abused DLL side-loading and DLL hijacking through legitimate software to launch malware while reducing detection. It has also used Registry Run persistence, scheduled tasks, and in-memory components, and has conducted network and host reconnaissance using native Windows utilities including netsh. Reported lateral movement tradecraft includes use of schtasks, WMI, PAExec, and net use. Credential access has included password dumping from domain controllers, and selected operations deployed keylogging capability. Malware and tooling associated with Naikon include the long-running Aria-Body or AR backdoor family, the earlier RARSTONE backdoor, and later-stage malware such as Nebulae and the first-stage backdoor RainyDay, also known as FoundCore. Aria-Body is an in-memory DLL backdoor lineage tied to Naikon code used since at least 2012 and provides remote access, persistence, file handling, shell and process management, HTTP communications, system information collection, and, in newer builds, keylogging. Nebulae has been used as a side-loaded second-stage backdoor and likely as a persistence and backup-access mechanism, while RainyDay has been used for reconnaissance, deployment of additional payloads, password dumping, lateral movement, and persistence. Naikon activity has also been linked to operations against Southeast Asian telecommunications providers in which Nebulae was used alongside credential dumping and custom keylogging on high-value assets. Naikon has been observed using masquerading to make malicious programs appear legitimate, including disguises themed as common software products. The group has also been associated with shared tooling ecosystems seen across multiple China-linked espionage clusters, and some reporting assesses continuity or overlap with the earlier Paradir operation. Known aliases include Naikon APT and Naikon Team.
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.
9 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
4 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.
Listed as an associated threat actor in detection annotations for Ghostscript exploitation; no specific campaign activity is described in this reference.
Listed as a threat actor associated with the malicious file execution technique detected by this analytic.
Referenced in the detection annotations as a threat actor associated with reconnaissance/exploitation behavior relevant to Netspy-style network scanning.
Listed in the detection annotations as a threat actor associated with EFI volume mounting / installation-related behavior.
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.