Loading threat actor…
Confucius is a South Asian cyber-espionage threat actor active since at least 2013 and widely assessed as an India-linked, pro-India state-sponsored group. It is also tracked as APT-C-23 and has been referred to in Chinese reporting as 魔罗桫; activity associated with its internal project naming has been described as Tibbar. Confucius has primarily targeted Pakistani government and military entities, while broader operations have also affected other South Asian and East Asian targets including organizations in China and Nepal. Victim sectors include government, military and defense, aerospace, shipbuilding, nuclear-related organizations, foreign trade, and technology companies. The group is known for spearphishing and socially engineered delivery using themed documents, self-extracting archives, shortcut files, malicious scripts, fake login pages, template injection, DDE lures, exploit documents, and trojanized Android applications. Confucius has used PowerShell, VBScript, and mshta.exe for execution, and has established persistence through Startup-folder placement and scheduled tasks. Its malware and loaders have included Delphi and .NET components, modular backdoors, file stealers, Android surveillanceware, and commodity or open-source RATs used in tailored espionage chains. A notable tradecraft pattern associated with Confucius malware is concealment of command-and-control discovery inside traffic to legitimate web services such as Quora and Yahoo Answers, using encoded lookup schemes rather than direct DNS resolution. Confucius tooling has also abused third-party cloud services for exfiltration and operations, including Dropbox, pCloud, Amazon S3, and Firebase or Google Cloud Messaging. Document theft has been a recurring objective, including collection of office files and other sensitive victim data. On Windows, Confucius has used file stealers capable of traversing multiple drives, automated collection, host profiling, and modular post-compromise tasking. Recent reporting describes a modular backdoor platform called Anondoor that side-loads through a legitimate Python executable, establishes persistence via scheduled tasking, fingerprints hosts and disks, derives a host identifier, retrieves commands, and loads follow-on components such as WooperStealer with runtime-supplied command-and-control parameters to complicate analysis and attribution. On Android, Confucius has been linked with surveillanceware families including ChatSpy, Hornbill, SunBird, and the backdoored chat application TweetyChat. These tools have supported extensive surveillance and exfiltration, including messages, contacts, call logs, geolocation, media, WhatsApp content, screenshots, audio recording, and attacker-directed remote actions. Reported mobile targeting has included individuals linked to Pakistan’s military and nuclear organizations as well as election-related personnel in Kashmir. Confucius has operational and tooling overlaps with other India-nexus clusters including Patchwork, Bahamut, Bitter, SideWinder, and Urpage, though overlap does not by itself imply common operators in every case. The actor’s dominant mission is espionage, with sustained focus on intelligence collection from strategic government, military, and industrial targets in South Asia and adjacent regions.
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.
45 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
20 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
15 additional families tracked in Mallory.
6 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 6 of them exploited in the wild.
APT41 leveraged the follow exploits... CVE-2015-1641...
...has exploited Office vulnerabilities such as CVE-2017-11882...
...has exploited Microsoft Office vulnerabilities... CVE-2018-0802.
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.
Zscaler's ThreatLabz named the APT28 campaign exploiting it "Operation Neusploit." Trellix published a detailed analysis. CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog... An India-linked threat actor is using CVE-2026-21509 weaponized documents to target Pakistani government entities... The attack follows the same CVE-2017-0199 → CVE-2017-11882 pattern documented in APT28's Operation Neusploit... Weaponized DOCX ... → CVE-2026-21509: Remote template injection
1 more CVE tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
204 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 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.
Referenced only as an India-nexus adversary with similarities to Mysterious Elephant.
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.