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Volt Typhoon is a People’s Republic of China state-sponsored threat actor active since at least mid-2021 and focused on U.S. critical infrastructure. It is also tracked as Bronze Silhouette, DEV-0391, Storm-0391, Insidious Taurus, UNC3236, and Vanguard Panda. Dragos tracks an overlapping activity cluster as VOLTZITE. Its strategic mission centers on establishing persistent access for potential disruptive or destructive operations during a major crisis or conflict, rather than conventional intelligence collection alone. Targets include electric power, telecommunications, water, energy, rail, and aviation infrastructure. Overlapping VOLTZITE activity includes collecting grid topology, geographic information system data, OT network diagrams, SCADA configurations, operating instructions, and engineering-workstation configuration and alarm data. This operational reconnaissance supports understanding infrastructure dependencies and conditions that could trigger process shutdowns; it does not establish that destructive attacks have occurred. Volt Typhoon emphasizes stealth, hands-on-keyboard operations, and living-off-the-land techniques. Initial access includes exploitation of internet-facing systems, including CVE-2021-40539 in ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus and CVE-2021-27860 in FatPipe products. The actor routes traffic through compromised small-office/home-office devices and uses proxy tools such as Earthworm and customized Fast Reverse Proxy clients to obscure its origins. Its techniques include Active Directory credential extraction, password spraying and brute force, host and network enumeration, remote execution through WMI and PsExec, port forwarding, webshell-based persistence and exfiltration, and selective log clearing.
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.
85 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
37 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
32 additional families tracked in Mallory.
33 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 33 of them exploited in the wild.
Initial Access: Volt Typhoon is known to exploit both known and zero-day vulnerabilities; known targeted products include Fortinet, Ivanti Connect Secure (formerly Pulse Secure), NETGEAR, Citrix, and Cisco CISA makes specific reference to the known FortiGate 300D firewall vulnerability CVE-2022-42475
Fortinet disclosed in February that the Chinese Volt Typhoon hacking group exploited two FortiOS SSL VPN flaws (CVE-2022-42475 and CVE-2023-27997) to backdoor a Dutch Ministry of Defence military network using custom Coathanger remote access trojan (RAT) malware.
Exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used software including, but not limited to: CVE-2021-40539—ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus.
"Lumen Technologies reported Chinese APT Volt Typhoon exploiting Versa Director servers (CVE-2024-39717), enabling credential interception and malicious code injection." | Lumen Technologies reported Chinese APT Volt Typhoon exploiting Versa Director servers (CVE-2024-39717), enabling credential interception and malicious code injection.
Exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used software including, but not limited to: ... CVE-2021-27860—FatPipe WARP, IPVPN, MPVPN.
28 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
196 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.
A Chinese state-backed actor whose campaign allegedly exploited TP-Link routers among several router brands, according to congressional testimony cited in the complaints. The article notes that the written testimony provides no source for this claim. TP-Link disputed the testimony, saying the campaigns showed no discernible preference for TP-Link routers.
A China-linked threat actor whose campaign allegedly exploited TP-Link routers. The content identifies energy, rail, water, and aviation as targeted sectors and discusses compromised SOHO routers being used to launch attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure.
Mentioned as historical evidence supporting state allegations about TP-Link product security. The cited testimony says TP-Link routers were exploited in its campaigns; the article provides no further actor-specific operational details.
Seeks access to critical infrastructure to enable disruptive or destructive attacks during a major crisis or conflict. Its activities provided background for the Taiwan simulation, rather than being directly represented in the exercise.
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.