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SideWinder is a long-running espionage threat actor widely assessed to originate from India and primarily focused on South Asian and adjacent regional targets. Known aliases include Rattlesnake, Razor Tiger, APT-C-24, SideWinder APT, and T-APT-04. The group has been associated with sustained cyber-espionage activity against government, military, diplomatic, and related strategic targets, with repeated targeting observed across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China, Nepal, Afghanistan, and other countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. SideWinder commonly relies on socially engineered lures and user-execution chains, including malicious documents, shortcut files, and script-based payload launchers. Reported tradecraft includes use of PowerShell, VBScript, and mshta.exe for execution; LNK-based delivery to retrieve remote payloads; HTTP-based command-and-control; and Registry-based autorun persistence. Post-compromise behavior includes extensive host profiling and reconnaissance, such as collecting usernames, computer names, operating system versions, installed hotfixes, processor and memory details, current system time, running processes, network interface information including MAC addresses, and file and directory listings. The actor demonstrates a modular intrusion style oriented toward intelligence collection and operational flexibility rather than disruptive or financially motivated operations. Observed capabilities include initial access through phishing-style lures, persistence via Windows autoruns, defense evasion through living-off-the-land execution mechanisms, and broad post-exploitation reconnaissance on compromised hosts. SideWinder has also been linked by tradecraft overlap to related regional activity clusters, though distinct groups such as SideCopy are generally tracked separately despite similarities in tooling and methods.
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.
51 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
14 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
9 additional families tracked in Mallory.
6 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 6 of them exploited in the wild.
Malicious Word and RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882 were used as initial infection vectors... The RTF file exploits CVE-2017-11882, a memory corruption vulnerability in the legacy Equation Editor. It embeds shellcode encoded as a hexadecimal character string, which is executed upon opening the document to initiate the next stage of the attack.
Malicious Word and RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882 were used as initial infection vectors... These vulnerabilities enable remote code execution through malicious Office documents: one by loading external content... The document contains an exploit for CVE-2017-0199, a vulnerability in Microsoft Office that allows remote code execution when a user opens a file that references an external object.
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.
An India-linked threat actor operating from machine MALDEV01 under username WarMachine is exploiting CVE-2026-21509 (Microsoft Office security feature bypass, CVSS 7.8) to target Pakistani government entities.
Sidewinder has exploited vulnerabilities to gain execution including... CVE-2020-0674.
1 more CVE tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
716 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.
Mentioned only in related content as another group using a ClickOnce-based infection chain.
Identified as a relatively active APT group focused on South Asia in April 2026, where campaigns primarily targeted government agencies and military institutions in Pakistan and government agencies in Saudi Arabia, mainly via spear-phishing.
Mentioned only as one of many threat actors associated with the ATT&CK technique/detection annotation for automated collection using Windows dir piped to findstr.
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.
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.