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Naikon, also known as Naikon APT and Naikon Team, is a China-linked cyber-espionage threat actor focused on government agencies and military organizations, particularly in Southeast Asia. Its operations emphasize persistent access, credential collection, internal network reconnaissance, lateral movement, and theft of sensitive information. Naikon uses spearphishing emails containing malicious attachments and persuades recipients to open them to execute malware. Its toolkit includes Aria-body loaders, Nebulae, and RainyDay. In an operation targeting Southeast Asian military organizations between June 2019 and March 2021, it initially deployed Aria-body loaders and Nebulae, adding RainyDay from September 2020. These backdoors support remote command execution, file transfers, process management, and information collection. The actor extensively uses DLL side-loading through legitimate applications, encrypted payloads executed in memory, and masquerading as trusted browser, software-update, and virtualization components. It establishes persistence through Windows services, scheduled tasks, and Run-key modifications. Naikon performs NetBIOS scanning and network-configuration discovery, dumps local passwords and cached domain credentials, collects browser credentials, and uses administrative domain credentials with Windows Management Instrumentation and scheduled tasks to execute tools on remote systems. Its operations have also included SSH brute-force attempts and deployment of reverse proxies. Naikon has used an automated file collector to monitor local and remote drives, stage documents and other files, and upload them to Dropbox. Its combination of credential theft, persistent implants, and automated collection supports sustained espionage within compromised networks.
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.
58 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
19 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
14 additional families tracked in Mallory.
2 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 2 of them exploited in the wild.
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.
The Naikon group used mostly spear-phished documents for the attacks, with CVE-2012-0158 exploits that dropped the group’s signature backdoor.
112 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.
Listed only in technique annotations. The content does not attribute ResetNightmare exploitation or a specific campaign to this group.
Naikon is listed in the detection's threat-actor annotations.
Listed in the detection's APT 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.