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Cycldek is a Chinese-speaking cyber espionage threat actor active since at least 2013 and widely known for targeting government, diplomatic, and related high-profile entities in Southeast Asia. Commonly cited aliases include Goblin Panda, APT27, and Conimes. Reporting has linked Cycldek activity particularly to Vietnam and Laos, with broader targeting across Southeast Asian governments and occasional activity affecting Thailand and parts of Central Asia. Cycldek is associated with spear-phishing campaigns that frequently use politically themed malicious RTF documents exploiting known vulnerabilities, including CVE-2018-0802, to deliver multi-stage malware. The group has repeatedly used DLL side-loading chains involving legitimate executables, malicious DLLs, and encoded payloads. Malware families and components associated with Cycldek include NewCore RAT and its BlueCore and RedCore variants, RedCore Loader, FoundCore, CoreLoader, DropPhone, and PCShare in some attributed or overlapping activity. FoundCore and related tooling have been observed providing full remote administration capability, including command execution, process and filesystem control, screenshot capture, encrypted command-and-control communications, persistence through Windows services, and anti-analysis or reverse-engineering resistance through obfuscated shellcode and malformed PE structures repaired at runtime. Cycldek has also been linked to removable-media-based collection and exfiltration through USBCulprit, indicating an ability to steal data from segmented or air-gapped environments. Across reporting, the actor demonstrates mature post-compromise tradecraft including persistence, exfiltration, defense evasion, and use of modular loaders and RATs. Some research notes code and infrastructure overlaps between Cycldek-associated tooling and other China-linked clusters, though not all such links are assessed with high confidence. Overall, Cycldek is best characterized as a China-linked espionage operator focused on long-term intelligence collection against state, diplomatic, and strategically relevant organizations in Southeast Asia.
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.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
19 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
8 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
3 additional families tracked in Mallory.
1 CVE this actor has used in observed campaigns. 1 of them exploited in the wild.
16 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
6 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Chinese-speaking threat group referenced in attribution of the FoundCore/RainyDay-related activity; mentioned as a possible tracker attribution for the same tooling/ecosystem around the PlugX variant and RainyDay configuration structure.
Low-confidence attribution for a June 2020–Jan 2021 campaign primarily targeting Vietnam (government/military and related sectors). Activity includes RoyalRoad-generated RTF exploitation (CVE-2018-0802) leading to a multi-stage chain (DropPhone/CoreLoader/FoundCore) and a FoundCore RAT with persistence and C2 over RC4-encrypted TCP or HTTPS.
Espionage actor targeting Southeast Asian governments; uses politically themed phishing with weaponized RTFs exploiting known vulnerabilities, deploys NewCore RAT variants, and uses USB-based tooling (USBCulprit) to exfiltrate data and potentially reach air-gapped networks.
Referenced because some Hellsing samples used a protocol specific to Cycldek backdoors, suggesting source-code or operational overlap.
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.