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SideWinder is an India-linked advanced persistent threat group associated with state-sponsored cyberespionage and active since at least 2012. It is also tracked as Rattlesnake, APT-C-24, Razor Tiger, T-APT-04, and SideWinder APT. Its operations primarily target Pakistan and other South Asian countries, with additional activity in Southeast Asia and Africa. Targets include government ministries, diplomatic missions, armed forces, law enforcement, political organizations, financial institutions, telecommunications organizations, maritime logistics operators, port authorities, and nuclear-sector organizations. The group uses tailored spearphishing emails containing malicious attachments or links, frequently adopting government, military, diplomatic, and administrative themes. It also operates fraudulent websites impersonating legitimate institutions. Document-based infection chains have exploited CVE-2017-0199, and its delivery techniques include ClickOnce-based execution and DLL sideloading through legitimate applications. SideWinder uses Base64 encoding and ECDH-P256-based cryptographic protection for scripts and files to hinder detection and analysis. Its toolkit includes StealerBot, a modular, memory-resident .NET espionage implant documented in 2024. StealerBot records keystrokes, captures screenshots, steals browser and saved Remote Desktop Protocol credentials, and exfiltrates documents and other sensitive files. It supports dynamically retrieved modules, secondary payload delivery, and interactive reverse-shell access. The ModuleInstaller downloader profiles compromised environments, retrieves and decrypts StealerBot, and injects it into memory. Anti-analysis measures include memory-capacity checks, inspection of loaded libraries, and process enumeration. Earlier operations used WarHawk, a loader supporting command execution, payload delivery, injection, and exfiltration. SideWinder has also used Telegram to receive malware command results. Documented operations include a 2021 phishing campaign against 61 targets across Afghanistan, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and a successful 2020 compromise of the Maldivian government. Later campaigns targeted Pakistani diplomats, Bangladeshi ministries, Sri Lankan military and financial institutions, and strategic organizations in Thailand and Indonesia. SideCopy is a separate actor that imitates SideWinder's techniques and should not be treated as an alias or subgroup.
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.
43 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
20 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
15 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.
One of these apps, called Camero, exploits CVE-2019-2215, a vulnerability that exists in Binder (the main Inter-Process Communication system in Android). This is the first known active attack in the wild that uses the use-after-free vulnerability.
1 more CVE tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
759 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.
Sidewinder is listed in the detection's annotations.
Listed as an associated threat actor for the JavaScript-execution technique.
Listed in the detection annotation metadata.
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.