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Aoqin Dragon is a cyberespionage threat actor active since at least 2013, primarily targeting government, education, and telecommunications organizations in Southeast Asia and Australia. Its documented targeting includes Australia, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam. Its operations focus on compromising endpoints, maintaining remote access, and collecting and exfiltrating information. The group uses weaponized Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2012-0158 and CVE-2010-3333, as well as executable droppers disguised as folders or antivirus software. Its document lures have included Asia-Pacific political themes. From 2018 onward, it used fake removable-device lures and malicious shortcuts distributed through USB devices. Spreader components copy malicious modules to removable media and propagate malware within compromised environments. Aoqin Dragon employs DLL hijacking and sideloading, payload encryption, Themida packing, process injection, and autostart entries for execution, defense evasion, and persistence. Aoqin Dragon's principal backdoors include Mongall and a modified version of the open-source Heyoka DNS-tunneling tool. Mongall provides remote shell access and file upload and download capabilities, with encoded or encrypted command-and-control communications. The modified Heyoka backdoor supports shell access, file operations, process management, and host discovery, using DNS tunneling for communications and exfiltration. The group also uses scripts to identify document formats and archive selected files for collection.
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.
39 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.