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Lotus Blossom is a China-linked cyberespionage group also known as Billbug, Thrip, Spring Dragon, Dragonfish, Bronze Elgin, Lotus Panda, Radium, and Raspberry Typhoon. Its activity has been tracked since at least 2009. The group primarily targets government and defense organizations in Asia, particularly South and Southeast Asia, and has also targeted a digital certificate authority. Associated APT30 activity includes government targeting in India, Thailand, and Malaysia and espionage against Belgian government institutions. The group combines custom backdoors with publicly available utilities and legitimate administrative tools. Initial-access techniques include spearphishing with malicious Office attachments and exploitation of public-facing applications. Post-compromise operations use PowerShell for payload delivery, reconnaissance, and lateral movement; AdFind for Active Directory enumeration; Mimikatz for credential theft; and PsExec and network-proxy tools to traverse compromised environments. Network scanning and document collection support intelligence gathering. Its malware includes Hannotog, Sagerunex, and Elise. These tools provide remote command execution, host reconnaissance, file transfer, and data theft. Persistence mechanisms include services, scheduled tasks, and autostart entries. Defense-evasion techniques include encrypted configurations and communications, timestamp manipulation, sandbox checks, and process injection. A campaign active from at least March 2022 compromised government and defense agencies across Asia alongside a certificate authority; successful theft or compromise of digital certificates was not established.
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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.
50 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
34 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
29 additional families tracked in Mallory.
12 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 12 of them exploited in the wild.
Lotus Blossom, a suspected China state-sponsored threat actor, exploited CVE-2025-15556 to hijack Notepad++'s update channel and deliver a Cobalt Strike Beacon and the Chrysalis backdoor.
The same analysis from CSW found that a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in the ListView/TreeView ActiveX controls used by Office documents (CVE-2012-0158) ... are being exploited by 23 APT groups, including most recently by the Thrip APT group (Lotus Blossom/BitterBug), in November 2022.
The same analysis from CSW found that ... a high-severity memory corruption issue in Microsoft Office (CVE-2017-11882) are being exploited by 23 APT groups, including most recently by the Thrip APT group (Lotus Blossom/BitterBug), in November 2022.
The outcome: no it is not CVE-2017-11882 but rather CVE-2018-0802. CVE-2018-0802? This a second exploit also included in EQNEDT32.EXE which was detected in later December.
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.
7 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
105 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 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.
Associated with Elise malware and described as primarily targeting governments and defense contractors.
Listed as an example threat actor associated with the detection's ATT&CK annotations; no specific campaign or activity is described in this reference.
Listed as an associated threat actor in detection annotations for Ghostscript exploitation; no specific campaign activity is described in this reference.
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.