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8220 Gang, also known as 8220 and Water Sigbin, is a China-based, financially motivated cybercriminal group active since at least 2017. Its principal activity is cryptojacking: compromising Windows and Linux servers to consume their computing resources for cryptocurrency mining, particularly Monero. The group targets internet-facing applications, cloud workloads, and container environments opportunistically. Documented victims include organizations in energy, healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, and cloud hosting, with attacks observed in South Korea and several countries across the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Initial access commonly involves automated scanning and exploitation of known vulnerabilities in Oracle WebLogic, Atlassian Confluence, Apache Log4j, and other exposed applications. Documented exploitation includes CVE-2017-3506, CVE-2019-2725, CVE-2020-14883, CVE-2021-44228, CVE-2022-26134, and CVE-2023-21839. The group also abuses misconfigured Docker services and weak SSH credentials. After compromise, it discovers additional systems, harvests SSH keys and connection information, and propagates through credential reuse and SSH brute forcing. Its tooling includes XMRig, the XMRig-derived PwnRig miner, PureCrypter, ScrubCrypt, K4Spreader, and Hadooken. Linux infection chains deploy shell or Python scripts, establish persistence through scheduled jobs and startup services, disable firewalls and cloud security agents, delete logs, and terminate competing miners. K4Spreader and Hadooken support malware deployment and propagation. The group also deploys the Tsunami IRC backdoor, providing remote command execution and DDoS capabilities. Windows infection chains use obfuscated PowerShell and batch scripts, encrypted multistage payloads, reflective .NET loading, process hollowing, and injection into legitimate processes. Defense-evasion techniques include AMSI and ETW patching, antivirus exclusions, anti-debugging checks, DLL sideloading, and UAC bypass. Persistence mechanisms include scheduled tasks and autorun entries. Mining proxies aggregate infected hosts' output and obscure the scale of mining operations. Although resource hijacking remains its dominant activity, campaigns have also deployed information-stealing malware and transmitted collected system and user information to command-and-control infrastructure.
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.
20 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.
9 CVEs Mallory has associated with this actor across public reporting. 9 of them are exploited in the wild (not necessarily by this actor).
3 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
124 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.