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APT41 is a China-linked threat actor associated with both state-directed cyber espionage and financially motivated cybercrime. It is widely tracked under numerous aliases including BARIUM, Winnti, Wicked Panda, Wicked Spider, Brass Typhoon, Double Dragon, Red Kelpie, Red Typhoon, Grayfly, and Blackfly. Some defenders distinguish separate sub-clusters within the broader activity set, particularly Grayfly as the espionage arm and Blackfly as the cybercrime arm. The group has also been linked to the Winnti umbrella and to long-running use of malware and shared tooling such as ShadowPad. APT41 is notable for conducting dual-purpose operations: espionage campaigns focused on intellectual property theft and strategic access, alongside financially motivated intrusions including activity against the video game sector. The actor has been associated with supply-chain compromises, third-party intrusions, and broad targeting across telecommunications, government, and technology-related environments. Reporting also links the group to attacks in Asia, Europe, and North America, with especially frequent victimization in the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Japan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Tradecraft attributed to APT41 includes spearphishing with malicious attachments for initial compromise, abuse of legitimate executables for DLL sideloading, use of PowerShell to deploy malware, scheduled tasks for persistence, registry modification, browser credential theft, keylogging, and network reconnaissance. The actor has used tools and malware families such as ShadowPad, PlugX, BrowserGhost, GOODLUCK, GEARSHIFT, and MoonBounce. APT41 has also been observed using certutil to retrieve additional payloads, WMI-based remote execution for post-compromise activity, and commands such as whoami, net share, and tasklist to enumerate users, shares, and processes. The group has been tied to advanced persistence mechanisms including UEFI bootkit activity through MoonBounce. APT41 is assessed as originating from China, and reporting has linked it to Chinese state interests. It has been described as operating from Chengdu and as part of the broader ecosystem of PRC-linked espionage activity. The actor is commonly associated with the Ministry of State Security-aligned threat landscape, although public tracking varies on whether all activity under the APT41 or Winnti labels reflects one organization or multiple closely related clusters.
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.
61 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
56 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
51 additional families tracked in Mallory.
35 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 35 of them exploited in the wild.
Among these vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-19781 was the most exploited flaw in 2020... Citrix Netscaler Application Delivery Control (ADC) is vulnerable to RCE and full system compromise due to poor access controls, thus allowing directory traversal.
APT41 used HTTP to download payloads for CVE-2019-19781 and CVE-2020-10189 exploits.
Attack vectors This campaign uses different means to enter and infect a target system: Injection of an SQL script into the system’s Microsoft SQL Server to upload a malicious file Exploitation of the Microsoft Exchange Server ProxyLogon vulnerability CVE-2021-26855 to upload a malicious web shell Possible distribution through emails containing malicious attachments
A Chinese advanced persistent threat tracked as Deep Panda has been observed exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerability in VMware Horizon servers to deploy a backdoor and a novel rootkit on infected machines with the goal of stealing sensitive data. The latest set of attacks documented by Fortinet shows that the infection procedure involved the exploitation of the Log4j remote code execution flaw (aka Log4Shell) in vulnerable VMware Horizon servers.
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.
30 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
2,011 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 only as an example of an older numeric naming convention for hacking groups.
Mentioned only as one of many threat actors associated with the ATT&CK technique/detection annotation for automated collection using Windows dir piped to findstr.
Listed as one of many threat actors associated with the detection's ATT&CK-style annotations for PowerShell and DNS TXT command-and-control behavior; no specific campaign or activity is described in this reference.
Used in the VulnGym evaluation as a modeled adversary profile for multi-stage enterprise attacks focused on data exfiltration and destructive wiper operations.
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.