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PAPERMILL is a China-nexus, financially motivated cybercrime activity cluster targeting Indian entities with tax-audit-themed phishing lures. It delivers VenomRAT through disk-image attachments that reduce Mark-of-the-Web protections. The infection chain abuses DLL sideloading with a renamed, legitimately signed Notepad++ executable and a malicious proxy DLL, which decrypts and reflectively loads an in-memory .NET VenomRAT payload using Donut shellcode. PAPERMILL employs anti-analysis checks covering system resources, uptime, user interaction, and display characteristics, and delays execution when sandbox-like conditions are detected. It attempts elevation through repeated UAC prompts and establishes user-level RunOnce persistence while masquerading as a legitimate Windows component. VenomRAT provides hidden VNC, information-stealing, file-grabbing, and remote-command capabilities. PAPERMILL shares tax-lure, containerized delivery, DLL-sideloading, and China-connected infrastructure characteristics with the Silver Fox ecosystem, but it has not been conclusively attributed to Silver Fox and may represent an independent operator or related cluster.
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.
17 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
2 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
37 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
3 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
An emerging phishing activity cluster targeting Indian tax-themed recipients. It delivers VenomRAT through tax-audit lures and disk-image attachments, abusing a renamed legitimately signed Notepad++ executable for DLL sideloading.
A China-nexus, financially motivated commodity-crimeware cluster targeting Indian tax-related entities. It uses tax-notice phishing, ISO/IMG containers to bypass Mark-of-the-Web protections, DLL proxy sideloading via Notepad++, anti-analysis delays, UAC-prompt persistence/elevation, Donut shellcode loading, and a VenomRAT payload.
A China-nexus, financially motivated commodity-crimeware cluster targeting Indian tax entities with tax-notice phishing. It delivers an ISO image disguised as an IMG file, abuses a legitimately signed Notepad++ binary for DLL sideloading, employs anti-analysis delays and environment checks, establishes RunOnce persistence, and delivers VenomRAT through encrypted Donut shellcode.
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.