Loading threat actor…
Aoqin Dragon is a long-running cyberespionage threat actor active since at least 2013 that primarily targets government, education, and telecommunications organizations in Southeast Asia and Australia. The group is assessed with moderate confidence to be a Chinese-speaking team, and its targeting and operational profile are consistent with espionage aligned with Chinese geopolitical interests. A potential association with UNC94 has been noted based on overlapping targeting, malware artifacts, infrastructure patterns, and Chinese-language development traces. Aoqin Dragon has used multiple initial access methods over time. Earlier activity relied on weaponized Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2012-0158 and CVE-2010-3333, including lures themed around regional political affairs and other social-engineering topics. The actor has also used executable droppers disguised as folders or antivirus software, as well as removable-media lures and USB shortcut techniques that impersonate external drives to induce user execution. The group is known for sustained use of the Mongall backdoor and a modified variant of the open-source Heyoka tool. Mongall has been used since at least 2013 and supports remote shell access, file upload and download, and encrypted or encoded communications. The modified Heyoka-derived backdoor added hardcoded command-and-control functionality and supported shell access, file operations, process management, host discovery, and data exfiltration over DNS-tunneling-style communications. Aoqin Dragon relies heavily on DLL hijacking across its loaders and backdoors, uses process injection to place payloads into legitimate processes, and has employed Themida packing to obfuscate malware. Persistence has been established through autostart entries. The actor has also used removable-media propagation components to copy malicious modules to external drives and spread within victim environments. Post-compromise behavior includes file and directory discovery, identification of document types of interest, and collection or staging of targeted files for exfiltration.
Mallory correlates actor tradecraft and target patterns against your stack, your sector, and your geography. See overlap before they land.
41 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
5 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
4 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 4 of them exploited in the wild.
During 2012 to 2015, Aoqin Dragon relied heavily on CVE-2012-0158 and CVE-2010-3333 to compromise their targets.
During 2012 to 2015, Aoqin Dragon relied heavily on CVE-2012-0158 and CVE-2010-3333 to compromise their targets.
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.
They were also aware that another malicious script had been injected into the same website in November 2014, leveraging CVE-2014-6332 to download a trojan horse to the target’s host.
242 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 an example threat actor associated with the detection's ATT&CK annotations for Linux system binary backdooring/masquerading behavior.
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 associated threat actor in detection annotations for Ghostscript exploitation; no specific campaign activity is described in this reference.
Listed as a threat actor associated with the malicious file execution technique detected by this analytic.
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.