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Tick, also tracked as BRONZE BUTLER, RedBaldKnight, Stalker Panda, Stalker Taurus, Swirl Typhoon, and Tellurium, is a China-linked cyber espionage threat actor. The group is known for targeting organizations in East Asia, particularly Japan, and has also been associated with activity affecting South Korea, Russia, China, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. Reported targeting indicates a strong focus on government and public sector entities, with additional activity against technology-related organizations. Tick commonly relies on spearphishing emails carrying malicious Microsoft Word attachments to obtain initial access and induce user execution. The group has used PowerShell, batch scripts, VBS, and VBE scripts for execution, and has downloaded encoded payloads that are decoded on victim systems. It has also used legitimate applications for DLL side-loading to launch malware while reducing suspicion. Post-compromise tradecraft includes screenshot capture, local file discovery and collection, file exfiltration, and use of scheduled tasks via schtasks during lateral movement. Tick has established persistence through Registry Run key modifications and has used command-line utilities such as net time for system time discovery. The group has also employed multiple methods to obfuscate command-and-control and exfiltration traffic, including Base64 encoding, RC4, AES, and custom XOR-based encoding. Operational cleanup has included deletion of archived data after exfiltration. The actor has also been observed naming malware to match existing files on shared systems to increase the likelihood of execution and evade scrutiny.
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.
65 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
40 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
35 additional families tracked in Mallory.
12 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 12 of them exploited in the wild.
The exploitation of a recently disclosed critical security flaw in Motex Lanscope Endpoint Manager has been attributed to a cyber espionage group known as Tick. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-61932 (CVSS score: 9.3), allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands with SYSTEM privileges... confirmed reports of active abuse of the security defect to drop a backdoor on compromised systems.
DevCore researchers made considerable progress that ultimately led to the discovery of a pre-authentication proxy vulnerability on Dec. 10, 2020. This vulnerability was given the name ProxyLogon by DevCore and is now known publicly as CVE-2021-26855.
RoyalRoad is a tool that generates weaponized RTF documents that exploit the following vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Equation Editor: CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798 and CVE-2018-0802.
RoyalRoad is a tool that generates weaponized RTF documents that exploit the following vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Equation Editor: CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798 and CVE-2018-0802.
...exploited Microsoft vulnerabilities, including CVE-2014-4114...
7 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
77 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.
Listed as a threat actor associated with the generic installation exploitation analytic, but no campaign-specific activity is described in this reference.
Mentioned only as one of many threat actors associated with the Masquerading technique annotation in a Splunk detection entry; no campaign-specific activity is described in this reference.
Listed as an example threat actor associated with the detection's ATT&CK annotations for Linux system binary backdooring/masquerading behavior.
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.