Loading threat actor…
Tropic Trooper is a China-linked cyber-espionage threat actor active since at least 2011, also known as KeyBoy, Pirate Panda, Tropic Troopers, and BRONZE HOBART. The group has targeted government, health care, transportation, high-technology, semiconductor, and rare-metal organizations, principally in the Asia-Pacific region and East Asia. Its operations are consistent with intelligence collection. Tropic Trooper commonly obtains initial access through targeted spearphishing, including malicious archives containing disguised shortcut files and decoy documents. It has used DLL side-loading through legitimate signed applications, including Windows and security-product executables, to execute malicious loaders while reducing detection. Campaigns have deployed Cobalt Strike Beacon and actor-associated tooling including Xiangoop Loader and EntryShell. EntryShell has substantial technical overlap with KeyBoy and is assessed as an evolved KeyBoy variant. The actor conducts post-compromise reconnaissance, including process enumeration, operating-system and volume discovery, saved-username discovery, and network-share enumeration. It has used encoded command-and-control data, HTTP-based communications, encrypted payload staging, and fileless in-memory execution. Observed second-stage operations include deeper host investigation and lateral movement to additional endpoints or servers.
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.
50 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
35 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
30 additional families tracked in Mallory.
8 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 8 of them exploited in the wild.
...has exploited client software vulnerabilities for execution, such as Microsoft Word CVE-2012-0158...
...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.
In our telemetry, we noticed exploitation attempts of several CVEs (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523 and CVE-2021-31207 in Microsoft Exchange, CVE-2023-26360 in Adobe ColdFusion). Therefore, we believe with moderate confidence that these web shells were dropped by exploiting an existing unpatched vulnerability.
3 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
97 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's APT annotations.
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.
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.
Referenced for overlap/comparison because it previously weaponized AdaptixC2 and had a related GitHub-linked beacon profile.
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.