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Tonto Team is a China-linked cyber-espionage threat actor tracked under numerous aliases including Bronze Huntley, CactusPete, Copper Typhoon, Earth Akhlut, Karma Panda, SharpR, TAG-74, and Tonto Team. The group is associated with long-running espionage activity focused primarily on East Asia and has repeatedly targeted organizations in Russia, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, Turkey, and other regional states. Reported victimology includes government, military and defense-related entities, research organizations, and other strategically relevant institutions. Multiple assessments link the actor to Chinese state interests, and some reporting places its operations in alignment with PLA Strategic Support Force-associated activity clusters. Tonto Team is known for spearphishing-led initial access, often relying on user execution of malicious attachments and lure documents. The group has used Royal Road weaponized RTF documents exploiting Equation Editor vulnerabilities and has deployed malware families including Bisonal, ShadowPad, EAGERBEE, OAED Loader, and NKN-goRAT. It has also been associated with campaigns involving malicious DLL loaders and abuse of legitimate signed executables to sideload payloads. In several observed intrusions, the actor used PowerShell to download additional payloads, abused legitimate Microsoft executables to launch malicious DLLs, and injected decrypted payloads into legitimate processes. Operationally, Tonto Team demonstrates a mature post-compromise toolkit. Observed behaviors include network share enumeration with tools such as NBTscan, host and environment reconnaissance, command execution, file upload and download, in-memory payload execution, persistence via Windows services, and modular backdoor deployment through ShadowPad and related loaders. Reporting also links the group to encrypted and listen-mode variants of EAGERBEE, indicating flexibility in command-and-control design and malware evolution. Tonto Team has also been identified as one of several Chinese espionage clusters using the privately shared ShadowPad platform, which complicates attribution when considered in isolation. The actor overlaps in tooling and tradecraft with other China-linked groups such as Tick and TA428, and some campaigns show evidence of shared malware, loaders, or infrastructure. Despite those overlaps, Tonto Team remains a distinct intrusion set recognized for sustained espionage operations against East Asian and Russian targets, especially in government and defense-related contexts.
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.
48 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
26 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
21 additional families tracked in Mallory.
15 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 15 of them exploited in the wild.
RoyalRoad is a tool that generates weaponized RTF documents that exploit the following vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Equation Editor: CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798 and CVE-2018-0802.
Royal Road is a tool that generates RTF files that exploit the Microsoft Office Equation Editor vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798, CVE-2018-0802).
RoyalRoad is a tool that generates weaponized RTF documents that exploit the following vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Equation Editor: CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798 and CVE-2018-0802.
May 2018: a new wave of targeted attacks abusing CVE-2018-8174 (this exploit has been associated with the DarkHotel APT group, as described on Securelist), with diplomatic, defense, manufacturing, military and government targets in Asia and Eastern Europe;
The Win32k vulnerability CVE-2019-0803 can be abused via a privilege escalation exploit that has PoC code available on GitHub [20]. We have seen several obfuscated samples that exploit this specific vulnerability use execution logic that is inspired by the freely available PoC.
10 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
353 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 a threat actor associated with the generic installation exploitation analytic, but no campaign-specific activity is described in this reference.
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.
Mentioned only as an annotation/tag associated with a privilege escalation detection.
Mentioned only as an annotated threat actor associated with the detection content; no campaign or activity by the group 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.