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Earth Lamia, also tracked as UNC5454 and written as EarthLamia, is a China-nexus cyberespionage intrusion set tracked since 2023. It targets organizations in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, with confirmed targeting in Brazil and India. Its targeting initially concentrated on securities and brokerage organizations through early 2024, expanded to logistics and online retail during the second half of 2024, and subsequently included information technology companies, universities, and government organizations. The group primarily gains initial access through SQL injection and exploitation of internet-facing applications. Its exploitation repertoire includes vulnerabilities in Apache Struts2, GitLab, WordPress plugins, JetBrains TeamCity, CyberPanel, and Craft CMS. Earth Lamia also exploited React2Shell, CVE-2025-55182, within hours of its public disclosure in December 2025. Following compromise, it deploys webshells, creates privileged accounts, steals credentials through LSASS memory dumping and extraction of local credential databases, enumerates domains and internal networks, and establishes proxy tunnels to support lateral movement. Its tools include GodPotato, JuicyPotato, a customized privilege-escalation utility called BypassBoss, Fscan, Kscan, rakshasa, Stowaway, VShell, Cobalt Strike, and Brute Ratel. Earth Lamia uses scheduled tasks for persistence and combines DLL sideloading, encrypted shellcode loaders, in-memory execution, tool modification, and Windows event-log clearing to evade detection. It frequently abuses legitimate security-vendor executables to load malicious components. Its modular .NET backdoor, PULSEPACK, first appeared in August 2024 and loads server-delivered plugins in memory for host reconnaissance and additional functionality. A version observed from March 2025 replaced TCP-based communication with WebSocket communication and moved core functionality into a server-delivered plugin. Despite tooling overlaps with ransomware-related intrusions, Earth Lamia has not been confirmed to deploy ransomware.
Who, where, and from where this actor operates. 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.
16 malware families Mallory has associated with this actor across public reporting.
11 additional families tracked in Mallory.
11 CVEs Mallory has associated with this actor across public reporting. 11 of them are exploited in the wild (not necessarily by this actor).
5 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
65 indicators attributed to this actor. Values are masked here and available in full in Mallory.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.