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Earth Longzhi is a China-linked advanced persistent threat actor tracked as a subgroup of APT41 and active since at least 2020. Its identification as an APT41 subgroup is based on victimology, shared Cobalt Strike metadata, loader code similarities, and overlapping operational techniques. Earth Longzhi is distinct from other related clusters such as Earth Baku and GroupCC, despite shared tooling and infrastructure-concealment methods. The group conducted two documented campaigns during 2020–2022. The first targeted government, infrastructure, healthcare, and academic organizations in Taiwan, as well as banking organizations in China. The second targeted defense, aviation, insurance, and urban development organizations across Taiwan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ukraine. Initial access primarily involved spear-phishing with password-protected archives and download links; the group also exploited publicly exposed applications. Earth Longzhi relies heavily on customized Cobalt Strike loaders, including Symatic, CroxLoader, BigpipeLoader, MultiPipeLoader, and OutLoader. Its execution and evasion techniques include DLL sideloading, process injection, parent-process masquerading, removal of user-mode security hooks, decoy documents, encrypted payloads, and multithreaded decryption through named pipes. It has also used Fastly CDN infrastructure to conceal command-and-control servers. Post-exploitation tooling supports credential dumping, network and password scanning, proxying, SQL command execution, and privilege escalation. The group has used PrintNightmare, PrintSpoofer, and standalone implementations of Mimikatz functionality, including logon credential extraction, DCSync, and browser credential recovery. Its ProcBurner and AVBurner tools abuse a vulnerable signed driver associated with CVE-2019-16098 to terminate protected processes and disable antivirus or EDR callbacks. Earth Longzhi also bypasses Windows UAC through the IElevatedFactoryServer COM object and creates elevated scheduled tasks for persistence.
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.
21 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
13 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
8 additional families tracked in Mallory.
2 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 2 of them exploited in the wild.
RTCore64.sys is a component of Afterburner. In 2019, this driver was assigned as CVE-2019-16098, which allows authenticated users to read/write any arbitrary address including kernel space. However, the outdated version of vulnerable driver still has a valid signature. As a result, the attacker can deliver the outdated version of the driver into the victim machine and abuse it for various purposes, such as for anti-antivirus or anti-EDR.
During the investigation of the second campaign, we collected multiple hacking tools used for privilege escalation (PrintNightmare and PrintSpoofer), credential dumping (custom standalone Mimikatz), and defense evasion (disablement of security products).
7 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
11 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Referenced as a previously reported subgroup whose domain naming pattern matched infrastructure seen in Cluster Charlie activity.
Chinese subgroup of APT41 referenced because Cluster Charlie infrastructure overlaps with Earth Longzhi C2 IPs and speedtest-themed domain patterns.
Referenced as a previously reported subgroup whose domain naming pattern overlaps with infrastructure used in Cluster Charlie activity.
Mentioned as an APT41-related group monitored by the researchers. No specific operations or involvement in the investigated campaign are attributed to it.
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.