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Confucius, also tracked as Confucius_APT and 魔罗桫, is an India-linked, state-sponsored cyberespionage group active since at least 2013. Its operations primarily target Pakistan and other South Asian entities, with additional targeting in China and Nepal. Targets include government and diplomatic organizations, military personnel, defense contractors, aerospace and shipbuilding enterprises, nuclear organizations, technology companies, and election officials in Indian-administered Kashmir. Its objectives include collecting sensitive government, defense, and industrial information and conducting surveillance of selected individuals. The group uses tailored spearphishing, counterfeit login portals, malicious attachments, self-extracting archives, and trojanized Android applications. Credential-phishing infrastructure impersonates webmail providers and target organizations. Windows delivery chains have used malicious Office macros, remote template injection, RTF exploits, and Dynamic Data Exchange. Confucius executes payloads through PowerShell, VBScript, and the Windows HTML Application Host, and establishes persistence through scheduled tasks. The Tibbar campaign, named after the operators' Project tibbar designation, employed DeMnu, Polyloader, AsyncRAT, and DarktrackRAT, including memory-loaded payloads and process replacement. Confucius uses document stealers and remote-access tools for collection and exfiltration. Swissknife uploads selected documents through the Dropbox API, while other stealers abuse pCloud. Associated backdoors have concealed command-and-control address discovery in content hosted on legitimate web services. Its Android tooling includes ChatSpy, TweetyChat, Hornbill, and SunBird. These tools support collection of messages, contacts, call records, documents, location information, screenshots, and audio; Hornbill and SunBird also abuse Android accessibility services to monitor WhatsApp communications. TweetyChat uses Amazon S3 for uploads and Google or Firebase messaging services for operational updates. Confucius shares some malware components and infrastructure characteristics with other South Asian intrusion sets, including Urpage and Patchwork, but these overlaps do not establish that they are the same actor.
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.
40 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.
Listed in the detection annotation metadata.
Listed only as an annotation associated with the detection.
Listed only in the detection's ATT&CK/actor annotations.
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.