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APT15, also known as Ke3chang, Nickel, Flea, Nylon Typhoon, Vixen Panda, and Playful Dragon, is a Chinese state-linked cyberespionage actor targeting government and diplomatic organizations. Its operations include campaigns against foreign affairs ministries in the Americas and government organizations in the Middle East and Africa. Documented compromises also include Thailand's armed forces. The group combines custom backdoors with publicly available credential-theft and reconnaissance tools. Its malware arsenal includes BS2005, Ketrican, Graphican, RoyalCli, RoyalDNS, Ketrum, Okrum, and MirageFox. Graphican evolved from Ketrican, which was derived from BS2005, and uses the Microsoft Graph API and OneDrive to retrieve command-and-control infrastructure information. RoyalDNS establishes persistence through a Windows service, while other operations use batch scripts to install persistence mechanisms. APT15 gains access through compromised VPN accounts and stolen VPN certificates, including certificates extracted from compromised hosts and subsequently used to regain access after eviction. Its operations have also involved exploitation of Microsoft Exchange vulnerability CVE-2020-0688 and web-shell deployment. Post-compromise activity includes credential dumping with Mimikatz, extraction of Active Directory account information, keylogging, and network scanning and enumeration. The group stages collected information in password-protected RAR archives before exfiltration and decodes Base64-obfuscated shellcode before loading it. APT15's RoyalCli and RoyalDNS backdoors are distinct from the Royal and BlackSuit ransomware operations.
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.
42 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
37 additional families tracked in Mallory.
18 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 18 of them exploited in the wild.
TidePool is embedded within an MHTML document that exploits CVE-2015-2545.
GREF was particularly active in the 2010 then it used different 0-day exploits, including CVE-2010-0806, CVE-2010-1297 and CVE-2010-2884 in its attacks.
There is page after page containing the commands used to gain initial access to their victims. All of them contain the same steps: a python script uses CVE-2020-0688 to execute commands on the victim.
The intruders gained initial access by chaining two critical Ivanti bugs, CVE-2024-8963 and CVE-2024-8190, days before they were publicly disclosed.
The intruders gained initial access by chaining two critical Ivanti bugs, CVE-2024-8963 and CVE-2024-8190, days before they were publicly disclosed.
13 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
260 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.
Reportedly participated alongside Akira in Royal's competition to develop a next-generation crypto-locker. Contestants apparently received initial access to victim networks; the article does not establish whether BlackSuit won.
Long-running China-based, state-aligned espionage cluster associated with desktop intrusions against diplomatic, government, contractor, think-tank, and human-rights targets, alongside mobile surveillance targeting Uyghur and Tibetan communities. Trojanized mobile applications collected communications, location, and other sensitive information. Attribution boundaries remain uncertain: the article notes disagreement over subgroup relationships and FireEye's reclassification of an older activity used to connect mobile and desktop operations. It reports Graphican activity in late 2022–early 2023 but does not establish current operational status. France, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are described only as possible mobile-campaign targets.
Annotation-only mention; no actor-specific operation or behavior is described.
Used ChatGPT to support reconnaissance, development, infrastructure configuration, and research into authentication-bypass and authorization-token-capture methods.
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.