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Cinnamon Tempest is a China-based threat actor tracked under multiple aliases including BRONZE STARLIGHT, DEV-0401, Emperor Dragonfly, Highground, and SLIME34. The group has been associated with intrusions that blend espionage objectives with ransomware-related tradecraft, and is notable for using ransomware in ways that appear intended to distract defenders, complicate attribution, or support post-compromise objectives rather than reflect a purely profit-driven model. The actor has targeted organizations in Southeast Asia, including the gambling sector, and has been linked to broader China-aligned intrusion activity. Reported operations have used malware and infrastructure overlaps associated with HUI Loader variants and Cobalt Strike, as well as customized open-source tooling such as proxying, tunneling, Meterpreter, and keylogging components. Cinnamon Tempest commonly abuses legitimate executables to side-load malicious DLLs and has used DLL search order hijacking to launch payloads including Cobalt Strike beacons. Observed tradecraft includes exploitation of public-facing applications for initial access, PowerShell-based execution and command-and-control activity, reconnaissance, creation of Windows services for persistence, privilege escalation through exploitation, lateral movement via WMI and Impacket, and deployment of ransomware through batch scripts distributed with Group Policy Objects. The group has also used weaponized DLLs to load and decrypt payloads and has established persistence by creating system services. The actor is unusual among human-operated ransomware clusters because it has been explicitly assessed as China-based while exhibiting a mix of espionage and ransomware behaviors. This combination, along with overlaps to other Chinese intrusion ecosystems, makes Cinnamon Tempest a significant example of convergence between state-aligned cyber espionage and criminal-style intrusion tradecraft.
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.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
46 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
18 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
13 additional families tracked in Mallory.
11 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 11 of them exploited in the wild.
Cynet has detected active exploitations of the Log4Shell vulnerability on VMware Horizon Servers by different threat actors who deployed Cobalt Strike beacons, Cryptominers, and fileless reverse shells.
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.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
6 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
51 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.
Listed in ATT&CK annotation metadata only; no campaign-specific behavior described.
Listed as an associated threat actor in the detection annotation for a Linux usermod root UID set analytic; no specific campaign or activity is described in this reference.
Listed as an associated threat actor in the detection annotation for exploitation of the public-facing PTC Windchill vulnerability CVE-2026-4681.
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.