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BackdoorDiplomacy, also written as backdoor_diplomacy and tracked as MITRE ATT&CK G0135, is a China-linked cyber-espionage group active since at least 2017. Its targeting includes institutions in Africa, the Middle East, and the United States, including telecommunications organizations. The group is associated with the Turian backdoor and combines custom implants with publicly available reconnaissance tools, red-team utilities, and leaked offensive capabilities. BackdoorDiplomacy gains initial access by exploiting public-facing applications and server misconfigurations. Documented activity includes exploitation of CVE-2020-5902 in F5 BIG-IP to deploy a Linux backdoor and compromise of misconfigured Plesk servers. Its acquired capabilities include DoublePulsar, EternalBlue, EternalRocks, and EternalSynergy. It uses open-source tools for discovery and lateral movement and EarthWorm for SOCKS5 tunneling and port forwarding. Its intrusion techniques include credential collection, network scanning, remote command execution, keylogging, and data exfiltration. Persistence mechanisms include Windows services, registry autorun entries, and WMI event subscriptions. Defense-evasion practices include VMProtect packing, DLL side-loading and DLL search-order hijacking, memory-resident payload execution, timestamp modification, and placement of implants in directories named after legitimate software. Legitimate executables are used to load malicious DLLs, helping malicious activity blend with ordinary software execution.
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.
27 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
22 additional families tracked in Mallory.
9 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 9 of them exploited in the wild.
BackdoorDiplomacy has exploited CVE-2020-5902, an F5 BIP-IP vulnerability, to drop a Linux backdoor.
The infection vector pointed to a vulnerable Exchange server, exploiting ProxyShell. Forensic evidence shows the attack started in August 2021, when the group deployed the NPS proxy tool and IRAFAU backdoor into the organization.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
The following analytic detects attempts to exploit CVE-2022-26134, an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Confluence... This activity is significant as it allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the Confluence server without authentication, potentially leading to full system compromise.
4 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
119 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 to illustrate uncertainty over APT15's organizational boundaries. The article says ESET sometimes treats BackdoorDiplomacy as a distinct subgroup, rather than as another name for the same team; it provides no separate operational details.
Listed in the detection annotation metadata.
Listed only as an annotation associated with the detection.
BackdoorDiplomacy is listed in the detection's threat-actor annotations.
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.