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Transparent Tribe, also tracked as APT36 and Mythic Leopard, is a Pakistan-linked cyber espionage threat actor focused primarily on Indian government, military, defense, and related public-sector targets, with additional activity against Afghan telecommunications and other critical infrastructure organizations in South Asia. Reporting also associates the SideCopy cluster with Transparent Tribe as either a closely related subgroup, subdivision, or operationally overlapping actor, although some researchers track SideCopy independently. Other aliases seen in reporting include Earth Karkaddan, Copper Fieldstone, Storm-0156, ProjectM, and Operation C-Major. The actor is known for sustained spearphishing and lure-driven intrusion activity using weaponized Office documents, macro-enabled files, archives containing malicious shortcuts, HTA-based chains, and trojanized installers themed to victim organizations. Transparent Tribe commonly uses spoofed or lookalike infrastructure impersonating government, defense, research, telecom, and file-sharing services. Observed delivery chains have included malicious VBA macros, VBScript, mshta-based execution, PowerShell, and browser-shortcut hijacking for persistence. Transparent Tribe has used a mix of custom and commodity malware. Malware and tooling associated with the actor include Crimson RAT, PATCHCORD, SHEETCORD, HACKERAI C2 Agent, NetWire RAT, WarzoneRAT/AveMaria, and infrastructure-linked credential-harvesting utilities. PATCHCORD is a Windows backdoor used in espionage operations against Afghan telecom providers and South Asian critical infrastructure; it supports host fingerprinting, process enumeration, arbitrary command execution, in-memory shellcode execution, and persistence through browser shortcut hijacking and autorun mechanisms. SHEETCORD is a Go-based implant that extends similar functionality while using Google Sheets for command and control and additional startup persistence. HACKERAI C2 Agent has been observed using GitHub Gists for command and control and data transfer. Transparent Tribe and related clusters have also used loaders, process hollowing, AMSI bypasses, anti-analysis logic, and DLL side-loading in some campaigns. Operational objectives are consistent with espionage. The actor has repeatedly targeted Indian government employees, defense organizations, military personnel, and defense-adjacent institutions using highly tailored decoys, including government forms, defense documents, and authentication-related themes. More recent activity shows expanded emphasis on Afghan telecom providers and South Asian critical infrastructure, as well as targeting of India’s energy sector and government IT environments. Observed post-compromise behavior includes system information discovery, security software discovery, credential harvesting, keylogging, file enumeration, remote command execution, and exfiltration.
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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.
47 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
54 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
49 additional families tracked in Mallory.
6 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 6 of them exploited in the wild.
the attachment was a weaponized RTF document utilizing CVE-2012-0158 to drop an embedded, encoded portable executable (PE)... In multiple lure documents, Type: Exploit, CVE-2012-0158, Embedded Payload.
...has exploited CVE-2012-0158 and CVE-2010-3333 for execution against targeted systems.
in one case, we saw attackers making use of template injection attack and equation editor vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) as the initial infection vector.
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.
诱饵文档不包含此类信息,而是通过受害者打开文档,触发CVE-2017-0199 漏洞从攻击者服务器请求携带有诱饵信息以及恶意DDE 域代码的docx 文件进行远程模板注入攻击。
1 more CVE tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
1,321 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.
Espionage campaign targeting Afghan telecom providers and critical infrastructure in South Asia using fake VPN tools and fake installers, deploying PATCHCORD, SHEETCORD, and HACKERAI C2 Agent for persistence, C2, credential harvesting, and command execution.
Suspected of conducting the PATCHCORD espionage campaign targeting Afghan telecom providers and South Asian critical infrastructure, using fake VPN installers, browser-shortcut hijacking persistence, Google Sheets-based command and control, and related implants including SHEETCORD and HACKERAI C2 Agent.
Conducting an active cyber espionage campaign dubbed PATCHCORD against telecommunications, government, defense, and critical infrastructure organizations in South Asia, using phishing operations and cloud-based command-and-control infrastructure.
Conducting a wider espionage campaign in South Asia using phishing lures, fraudulent installers, cloud-hosted command-and-control channels, and malware including HACKERAI, PATCHCORD, and SHEETCORD against telecom, government, defense, energy, and critical infrastructure organizations.
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.