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Lotus Blossom is a long-established advanced persistent threat group active since at least 2009. It is also referred to in the provided content as APT30, Billbug, Thrip, Lotus Panda, Red Salamander, Raspberry Typhoon, Bronze Elgin, Dragonfish, Spring Dragon, Bilbug, Radium, G0030, and related Lotus Blossom variants. The content describes the group as China-linked, with multiple sources assessing that it operates on behalf of China. The group is associated with espionage activity and has targeted organizations in Southeast Asia and other Asian countries, including government, defense, telecommunications, manufacturing, banking, energy, media, military, and digital certificate issuer sectors. Additional reported targeting in the content includes communications, geospatial imaging, and defense entities in the United States, as well as victims in France and Canada. A later campaign attributed to the group targeted a digital certificate authority and multiple government and defense agencies in Asia, with activity ongoing since at least March 2022. Lotus Blossom is closely associated with the Sagerunex backdoor, described in the content as an espionage backdoor capable of modifying configuration, executing remote commands, downloading files, and exfiltrating files to command-and-control servers. Reported tradecraft includes use of WinHTTP for C2, multiple proxy discovery methods, Explorer token impersonation, configurable operating windows, HTTPS communications, AES256-CBC-encrypted communications in one analyzed sample, and support for commands to execute programs, shell commands, and steal local files. The group has also used Hannotog and the Stowaway proxy tool, and has used HTran for proxying traffic. Observed tactics and techniques in the content include exploitation of public-facing applications for initial access, spearphishing emails with malicious attachments including DOC files, PowerShell for downloading payloads, reconnaissance, and movement within compromised networks, use of Mimikatz and PsExec, port scanning and service enumeration, local staging of compressed and archived data for exfiltration, creation of Windows services for persistence, and writing tools such as Sagerunex to the Windows registry. The content also links Lotus Blossom to the 2025 Notepad++ supply chain compromise, where Rapid7 attributed the activity with moderate confidence to Lotus Blossom, also known there as Billbug or Raspberry Typhoon. In that campaign, attackers selectively redirected update traffic to trojanized installers and deployed a previously undocumented backdoor named Chrysalis, using DLL side-loading, Microsoft Warbird obfuscation, and follow-on Cobalt Strike and Metasploit activity. Attribution in the content was supported by tooling overlaps with prior Lotus Blossom activity, including the reuse of a renamed Bitdefender binary and a rare API hashing algorithm shared with Sagerunex.
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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.
57 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
24 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
19 additional families tracked in Mallory.
12 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 12 of them exploited in the wild.
Lotus Blossom, a suspected China state-sponsored threat actor, exploited CVE-2025-15556 to hijack Notepad++'s update channel and deliver a Cobalt Strike Beacon and the Chrysalis backdoor.
The same analysis from CSW found that a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in the ListView/TreeView ActiveX controls used by Office documents (CVE-2012-0158) ... are being exploited by 23 APT groups, including most recently by the Thrip APT group (Lotus Blossom/BitterBug), in November 2022.
The same analysis from CSW found that ... a high-severity memory corruption issue in Microsoft Office (CVE-2017-11882) are being exploited by 23 APT groups, including most recently by the Thrip APT group (Lotus Blossom/BitterBug), in November 2022.
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.
CVE-2009-4324 and CVE-2010-0188: Legacy Adobe Reader and Acrobat vulnerabilities exploited during the group’s initial detection phase...
7 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
75 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.
Referenced as a threat actor associated with the MITRE ATT&CK technique T1090.003 (Multi-hop Proxy) in the detection annotation for access to anonymizer services.
Newly observed actor in the current finance-sector campaign period.
Listed as an associated threat actor for exploitation activity related to abuse of the Windows Cloud Files API / cldapi.dll detection.
Named threat actor referenced in global threat reporting.
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.