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Confucius is a suspected India-aligned, state-sponsored cyber-espionage group active since at least 2013. Also known as Confucius APT, APT-C-23, and 魔罗桫, the group primarily targets Pakistani and other South Asian government, military, defense-industrial, diplomatic, nuclear, aerospace, shipbuilding, technology, and trade entities. Documented campaigns have also targeted organizations in China and Nepal. The Tibbar campaign focused on collecting strategically valuable defense and industrial information. Confucius conducts spearphishing and tailored social engineering using credential-harvesting pages, malicious attachments, exploit documents, template injection, DDE-enabled documents, self-extracting archives, and Android applications masquerading as legitimate software. It has used Visual Basic scripts, PowerShell, and the Windows HTML Application host for execution, and has established Windows persistence through Startup-folder payloads. Its tooling includes desktop stealers and loaders as well as Android surveillanceware including ChatSpy, Hornbill, SunBird, and TweetyChat. These mobile implants have supported collection and exfiltration of communications, contacts, call records, device and location data, media, documents, and messaging-application content; some also support screenshots, audio recording, camera capture, and remotely directed commands. The group has used legitimate web platforms to resolve command-and-control infrastructure covertly, cloud-storage APIs to exfiltrate stolen documents, and cloud messaging services to update mobile-malware configuration. Confucius operations have also used obfuscation, deceptive file presentation, malware staging, and decoy content to evade detection. Technical and infrastructure overlaps have been reported with South Asian activity clusters including SNEEPY/ByeByeShell, Patchwork, Hangover, Bahamut, and Urpage, though such overlap does not necessarily establish common operational control.
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.
45 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
20 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
15 additional families tracked in Mallory.
6 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 6 of them exploited in the wild.
APT41 leveraged the follow exploits... CVE-2015-1641...
...has exploited Office vulnerabilities such as CVE-2017-11882...
...has exploited Microsoft Office vulnerabilities... CVE-2018-0802.
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.
Zscaler's ThreatLabz named the APT28 campaign exploiting it "Operation Neusploit." Trellix published a detailed analysis. CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog... An India-linked threat actor is using CVE-2026-21509 weaponized documents to target Pakistani government entities... The attack follows the same CVE-2017-0199 → CVE-2017-11882 pattern documented in APT28's Operation Neusploit... Weaponized DOCX ... → CVE-2026-21509: Remote template injection
1 more CVE tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
204 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 one of many threat actors associated with the detection's ATT&CK-style annotations for PowerShell and DNS TXT command-and-control behavior; no specific campaign or activity is described in this reference.
Mentioned only as one of many threat actors associated with the ATT&CK technique/detection annotation for automated collection using Windows dir piped to findstr.
Referenced only as an India-nexus adversary with similarities to Mysterious Elephant.
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.