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CL-STA-0048 is a China-linked cyber-espionage activity cluster tracked by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. Active against high-value organizations in South Asia since at least May 2024, it targets telecommunications organizations and government agencies to obtain government employee personal information and sensitive organizational data. Its operations emphasize exploitation of internet-facing applications, methodical reconnaissance, persistent access, and database harvesting. The cluster has targeted Microsoft IIS, Apache Tomcat, and Microsoft SQL Server services and exploited SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer vulnerability CVE-2025-31324. Its tooling includes PlugX, Cobalt Strike, Winos4.0-based malware, SoftEther VPN, and the Stowaway and iox tunneling utilities. It uses DLL sideloading and process injection to execute implants, legitimate utilities such as PowerShell and certutil for payload delivery and reconnaissance, and a technique termed Hex Staging to assemble hexadecimal-encoded payloads before decoding them. Privilege-escalation activity includes SspiUacBypass and Potato Suite tools, while credential-access attempts include LSASS memory dumping. It establishes database access through privileged SQL accounts and deploys proxies to enable access through compromised systems. CL-STA-0048 searches database metadata for sensitive records and collects personal and client information. It stages data for transfer over command-and-control channels and exfiltrates command output and stolen data through hexadecimal-encoded DNS subdomain queries, including lookups triggered with ping. Its SAP post-exploitation activity includes network discovery and application mapping.
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.
38 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
8 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
3 additional families tracked in Mallory.
1 CVE this actor has used in observed campaigns. 1 of them exploited in the wild.
40 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
15 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Referenced as a Chinese espionage group previously observed exploiting SAP product vulnerabilities, specifically CVE-2025-31324 affecting SAP products including SAP NetWeaver.
Referenced as a China-nexus espionage cluster previously observed weaponizing SAP product flaws including CVE-2025-31324.
China-linked cluster targeting IIS servers and using hex-encoded DNS subdomain queries for data exfiltration.
China-aligned threat cluster previously observed singling out IIS web servers; noted as tactically close to OP-512.
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.