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BlackTech is a China-linked cyber espionage threat actor focused primarily on East Asia, especially Taiwan and Japan, with additional activity affecting Hong Kong and the United States. The group is widely tracked under aliases including APT24, Circuit Panda, Palmerworm, Pitty Panda, PittyTiger, Canary Typhoon, and HUAPI, and has also been associated with the PLEAD, Waterbear, TSCookie, Flagpro, Gh0stTimes, BIFROSE, KIVARS, XBOW, BTSDoor, Consock, dbgPrint, and Hipid malware clusters. BlackTech has conducted long-running intelligence collection operations against government entities, technology companies, semiconductor and electronics firms, financial organizations, media, telecommunications, manufacturing, and professional services. Reporting also links the actor to compromises of Taiwanese government agencies and outsourced IT providers, indicating supply-chain and trusted-relationship targeting. In Japan, the group has been observed targeting organizations since at least 2018. The actor commonly uses spearphishing with malicious documents, including password-protected archives and macro-enabled Office files, to gain initial access and execute malware. BlackTech is also notable for exploiting internet-facing infrastructure and network appliances, including vulnerabilities in products such as F5 BIG-IP, Microsoft IIS, Citrix, VMware, Oracle WebLogic, routers, and other edge devices. Public reporting further describes the group’s use of router scanning and exploitation to establish covert infrastructure and operational relay points. BlackTech frequently employs DLL side-loading and search-order hijacking, often pairing malicious libraries with legitimate executables. Its malware ecosystem spans both Windows and Linux or Unix-like systems and includes modular backdoors, loaders, downloaders, credential theft components, remote shells, proxying and port-mapping functions, and exfiltration tooling. Waterbear has been used as a modular secondary backdoor for persistence and follow-on access; PLEAD and TSCookie are established backdoor families associated with the group; Flagpro has been used for early-stage victim profiling and credential collection; Gh0stTimes is a customized Gh0st RAT derivative with enhanced relay capability; and ELF_PLEAD and Unix BIFROSE variants demonstrate sustained Linux-focused development. Operationally, BlackTech has shown strong emphasis on persistence, stealth, and post-compromise maneuvering. Reported behaviors include credential theft from browsers, Outlook, WinInet, and Windows credential stores; shellcode injection into Windows services; use of SoftEther VPN for long-term access and data transfer; deployment of malware on previously compromised hosts; remote shell execution; file collection and exfiltration; and use of anti-analysis and defense-evasion techniques such as RC4-encrypted payloads, dummy code, inflated binaries, stripped symbols, and user-notice suppression. The group’s campaigns have sought sensitive government, defense, budgetary, foreign affairs, contract, and semiconductor-related information. BlackTech is best characterized as an espionage-motivated intrusion set aligned with Chinese strategic interests, though public reporting stops short of formal public attribution to Chinese security services.
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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.
60 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
37 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
32 additional families tracked in Mallory.
18 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 18 of them exploited in the wild.
We’ve also seen PLEAD use exploits for these vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-5119, patched by Adobe last July, 2015 ... PLEAD also dabbled with a short-lived, fileless version of their malware when it obtained an exploit for a Flash vulnerability (CVE-2015-5119) that was leaked during the Hacking Team breach
PLEAD also uses CVE-2017-7269, a buffer overflow vulnerability Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 to compromise the victim’s server. This is another way for them to establish a new C&C or HTTP server.
We’ve also seen PLEAD use exploits for these vulnerabilities: ... CVE-2012-0158, patched by Microsoft last April, 2012
We’ve also seen PLEAD use exploits for these vulnerabilities: ... CVE-2014-6352, patched by Microsoft last October, 2014
We’ve also seen PLEAD use exploits for these vulnerabilities: ... CVE-2017-0199, patched by Microsoft last April, 2017
13 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
458 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.
Conducting cyberespionage-focused post-compromise operations against organizations in Japan using a Linux variant of BlueShell for remote command execution, file transfer, shell access, SOCKS5 proxying, and stealthy persistence/evasion after SSH-based lateral movement.
Listed incidentally in detection metadata for ATT&CK T1190.
Listed as an associated threat actor in detection annotations for Ghostscript exploitation; no specific campaign activity is described in this reference.
Listed as an associated threat actor in the detection annotation for exploitation of the public-facing PTC Windchill vulnerability CVE-2026-4681.
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.