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Tonto Team is a China-linked cyber-espionage group also tracked as Bronze Huntley, CactusPete, Copper Typhoon, Earth Akhlut, Karma Panda, Sharp R, TAG-74, and Team Tonto. It has been linked to Chinese nation-state activity aligned with the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. The group has targeted organizations in East Asia and elsewhere, including Russia, Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, and Turkey. Tonto Team has used spearphishing attachments and Royal Road weaponized RTF documents exploiting Microsoft Office Equation Editor vulnerabilities to establish access. It has used Bisonal against East Asian targets and has been associated with ShadowPad activity. The group has also used EAGERBEE and OAED Loader; OAED Loader has delivered ShadowPad, ABK downloader, and NKN-goRAT in observed activity. EAGERBEE supports in-memory execution of downloaded payloads, while NKN-goRAT provides remote command execution and file-transfer capabilities. Observed tradecraft includes PowerShell-based payload retrieval, network-share enumeration using NBTscan, DLL sideloading through legitimate signed applications, process injection, and Windows service-based persistence. Tonto Team’s use of shared Chinese espionage tooling, particularly ShadowPad and Royal Road, complicates attribution and overlaps with activity associated with other China-linked groups, including Tick and TA428.
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.
48 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
26 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
21 additional families tracked in Mallory.
15 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 15 of them exploited in the wild.
RoyalRoad is a tool that generates weaponized RTF documents that exploit the following vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Equation Editor: CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798 and CVE-2018-0802.
Royal Road is a tool that generates RTF files that exploit the Microsoft Office Equation Editor vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798, CVE-2018-0802).
RoyalRoad is a tool that generates weaponized RTF documents that exploit the following vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Equation Editor: CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798 and CVE-2018-0802.
May 2018: a new wave of targeted attacks abusing CVE-2018-8174 (this exploit has been associated with the DarkHotel APT group, as described on Securelist), with diplomatic, defense, manufacturing, military and government targets in Asia and Eastern Europe;
The Win32k vulnerability CVE-2019-0803 can be abused via a privilege escalation exploit that has PoC code available on GitHub [20]. We have seen several obfuscated samples that exploit this specific vulnerability use execution logic that is inspired by the freely available PoC.
10 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
359 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 "Tonto Team" in the detection's Annotations section.
Listed in the detection's APT annotations as Tonto Team.
Tonto Team is listed in the detection's ATT&CK annotations for T1068, Exploitation for Privilege Escalation.
Listed as “Tonto Team” in the analytic's ATT&CK annotations.
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.