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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 and 魔罗桫, it has conducted sustained intelligence collection against Pakistan and other South Asian targets, as well as organizations in China and Nepal. Its Tibbar campaign targeted government, defense, aerospace, shipbuilding, nuclear, trade, and technology organizations, apparently seeking military, defense-industrial, and strategic information. Confucius commonly uses tailored phishing, malicious attachments, fake login pages, exploit documents, template injection, DDE documents, self-extracting archives, and Android applications to gain access. The group has used VBScript, PowerShell, and mshta for execution. Associated toolchains include DeMnu, Polyloader, AsyncRAT, DarktrackRAT, Swissknife, Hornbill, SunBird, TweetyChat, and ChatSpy. Its Android surveillance tooling has collected communications, contacts, call records, location, media, documents, device metadata, and data from messaging applications; some variants can capture screenshots, record audio, and execute attacker-directed actions. The group has used cloud services and legitimate web platforms to blend command-and-control and exfiltration traffic with normal activity. This includes deriving command-and-control information from public web content and uploading selected documents through cloud-storage APIs. It has also used obfuscation, masquerading, deceptive file-format presentation, and process-replacement techniques. Confucius-linked operations demonstrate reconnaissance, credential phishing and theft, automated collection, targeted document collection, and data exfiltration. CONFUCIUS_A and CONFUCIUS_B denote related malware clusters, with historical links respectively to SNEEPY/ByeByeShell activity and to Patchwork/Hangover-related activity. The Tibbar designation reflects an internal project name observed in Confucius-associated operations.
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 in the detection annotation metadata.
Listed only as an annotation associated with the detection.
Listed only in the detection's ATT&CK/actor 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.