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APT10, also known as MenuPass, Stone Panda, Cicada, Red Apollo, POTASSIUM, HOGFISH, BRONZE RIVERSIDE, CVNX, Purple Typhoon, and other aliases, is a long-running China-nexus cyber-espionage threat actor publicly linked by the United States government to China’s Ministry of State Security, specifically the Tianjin State Security Bureau, with activity dating back to at least the late 2000s. The group is best known for strategic espionage, including theft of intellectual property, government information, and technology-related secrets, and for compromising managed service providers and other trusted intermediaries to gain downstream access into customer environments, as exemplified by Operation Cloud Hopper. APT10 has targeted a broad global victim set spanning government, defense, aerospace, healthcare, biotechnology, finance, maritime, energy, telecommunications, manufacturing, mining, advanced technology, legal, religious, and non-governmental organizations. Reporting also places related activity against Japanese political entities, think tanks, academia, media, high-technology, and manufacturing organizations, and against telecommunications providers and IT service providers. Public reporting describes campaigns affecting organizations across Europe, Asia, and North America, with especially strong historical focus on Japan and additional targeting in the United States, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Israel, Turkey, Italy, Montenegro, and the United Kingdom. The group commonly gains initial access through spearphishing attachments, malicious documents, user-executed files, exploitation of public-facing enterprise applications, and abuse of trusted relationships such as MSP connectivity. Observed tradecraft includes PowerShell and command-shell execution, use of WMI and scheduled tasks, credential dumping, use of valid accounts, Active Directory enumeration and export, reconnaissance of files, folders, and network configuration, lateral movement over remote services, and staging, compression, and exfiltration of collected data. APT10 has also used certutil for decoding staged payloads, reflective and in-memory loading techniques, and DLL sideloading to deploy malware while reducing detection opportunities. Malware and tooling associated with APT10 across public reporting include SOGU, HAYMAKER, SNUGRIDE, BUGJUICE, QUASARRAT, RedLeaves, PlugX, UPPERCUT or ANEL, ChChes, LODEINFO, NOOPDOOR, NOOPLDR, Sodamaster, SigLoader, FYAnti, and customized credential theft and loader components. Some reporting places subclusters or related activity such as MirrorFace, also tracked as Earth Kasha, within a broader APT10 umbrella, particularly where there is overlap in tooling lineage, victimology, and espionage objectives. MirrorFace has been described as a China-aligned espionage subgroup focused heavily on Japan and later parts of Europe, using ANEL, HiddenFace or NOOPDOOR, customized AsyncRAT, Visual Studio Code Remote Tunnels, spearphishing, exploitation of internet-facing appliances, anti-forensics, and DLL sideloading. Not all activity discussed under the broader umbrella should be treated as identical to legacy APT10, but the overall cluster is consistently assessed as espionage-driven and aligned with Chinese state interests.
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.
55 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
32 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
27 additional families tracked in Mallory.
11 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 11 of them exploited in the wild.
The Microsoft Windows Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC) reuses a known, static, zero-value initialization vector... Threat actors were seen combining the MobileIron CVE-2020-15505 vulnerability for initial access, then using the Netlogon vulnerability... A nation-state APT group has been observed exploiting this vulnerability.
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.
The title of the lure was “2016年台灣總統選舉觀戰團 行程20160105.xls” which translates to “2016 Taiwan president election watching group schedule”. Once the spreadsheet is opened, CVE-2012-0158 is exploited and a file called 6EC5.tmp is dropped in the %TEMP% folder.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
6 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
273 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.
APT10 is mentioned only as part of related article metadata, not as part of the main incident or analysis.
Associated with exploiting cloud environments, OAuth tokens, and legitimate services.
Referenced as the umbrella group to which MirrorFace is assessed to belong; the revival of the APT10-linked ANEL backdoor is cited as reinforcing that lineage.
Related The role of China in the Persian Gulf and potential cyberthreats: ... Tags: APT, APT10, China, Critical Infrastructure, Energy
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.