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Kimsuky is a North Korean cyber threat actor conducting espionage aligned with the North Korean government's geopolitical interests, alongside financially motivated cybercrime that supports its operations. It has been active since at least 2018. Tracking names associated with the actor include APT43, APT-C-55, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, GreenDinosaur, SharpTongue, Sparkling Pisces, Springtail, TA408, TA427, Thallium, and Velvet Chollima. Its targeting is concentrated in South Korea, with additional activity affecting the United States, Japan, Russia, and other countries. Kimsuky uses spearphishing links and malicious Microsoft Word, Excel, and Hangul Word Processor attachments for initial access, including documents containing malicious macros. It harvests credentials using Mimikatz and ProcDump and has used pass-the-hash authentication with remote-access software supporting command and control. Its post-compromise toolkit includes PsExec and interactive RDP access. Persistence mechanisms include RDP, newly created Windows services, local account creation and group-membership manipulation, and modified open-source PHP web shells. Scheduled tasks have been used to download additional malware. The actor conceals malicious activity through XOR and Base64 obfuscation of binary strings, Base64 decoding of malicious VBScripts, and command-and-control infrastructure masquerading as websites associated with shopping malls, governments, universities, and other organizations. It has also used Win7Elevate to inject malicious code into a Windows shell process.
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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.
99 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
70 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
65 additional families tracked in Mallory.
22 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 22 of them exploited in the wild.
Recently Exploited Vulnerabilities by Kimsuky: CVE-2017-11882
“In some systems, initial access was gained through exploiting the RDP vulnerability (BlueKeep, CVE-2019-0708). While an RDP vulnerability scanner was found in the compromised system, there is no evidence of its actual use.”
ZDI identified nearly 1,000 malicious .lnk files abusing ZDI-CAN-25373 (aka ZDI-25-148), a vulnerability that allows attackers to execute hidden malicious commands on a victim’s machine by leveraging crafted shortcut files.
APT28 has used a variety of public exploits, including CVE 2020-0688 ... to gain execution on vulnerable Microsoft Exchange... Dragonfly ... exploited ... CVE-2020-0688 for ... MS Exchange... Kimsuky ... including Microsoft Exchange vulnerability CVE-2020-0688. MuddyWater has exploited the Microsoft Exchange memory corruption vulnerability (CVE-2020-0688). During the SolarWinds Compromise, APT29 exploited CVE-2020-0688 against the Microsoft Exchange Control Panel...
Recently Exploited Vulnerabilities by Kimsuky: CVE-2017-0199
17 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
2,953 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.
The excerpt attributes a malicious Windows shortcut named '[붙임]응시원서.lnk' to Kimsuky. It masquerades as a Defense Acquisition Program Administration application form. The text also reports that a jewelry-packaging design and production studio's website was compromised to host a batch file, jnDFN67s.bat, used to execute the malware. The excerpt is truncated and provides no further operational details.
Referenced as the named threat actor covered by an AhnLab August 2026 report concerning APT attacks in South Korea. The post associates the activity with phishing and LNK files, and mentions AutoIt, XenoRAT, Hangul, GitHub, and PubNub; however, the excerpt does not establish the exact operational relationship of each item to Kimsuky.
Kimsuky appears only as a tag on AhnLab's August 2026 South Korea APT trend report; the report does not explicitly attribute any of the described attack types to Kimsuky.
Conducting a targeted malware-lure campaign impersonating Shinhan Life insurance documents, aimed at insurance policyholders or contractors, insurance planners/GA staff, and insurance-company personnel.
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.