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Earth Lusca is a China-linked cyberespionage threat actor tracked under multiple aliases including Aquatic Panda, Charcoal Typhoon, Fishmonger, RedHotel, TAG-22, Chromium, and ControlX. Reporting associates the group with Chinese-speaking operations and places it within the broader Chinese state-sponsored intrusion ecosystem. Some reporting also links related activity to Chengdu-based clusters, though attribution across ShadowPad-using groups remains complex because tooling is shared among multiple China-aligned operators. Earth Lusca has targeted organizations in Taiwan, Nepal, the Philippines, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Argentina, and China, with victimology spanning government, education, healthcare, transportation, telecommunications, finance, industrial and energy-related entities, and at least one trading company. The group has been repeatedly associated with espionage-focused operations against public-sector and strategic targets in Asia, especially Taiwan. The actor uses a diverse malware arsenal that includes ShadowPad, Winnti-related tooling, Spyder, Cobalt Strike, and the Golang backdoor KTLVdoor. KTLVdoor supports Windows and Linux and provides command execution, file manipulation, upload and download, proxying, port scanning, process management, timestomping, and shellcode or DLL injection. Earth Lusca has also been associated with DLL sideloading chains and with use of ShadowPad-family tooling in operations where attribution was assessed with varying confidence. Observed tradecraft includes acquisition and operational use of third-party malware such as Cobalt Strike; malicious LNK and HTA execution through mshta.exe; PowerShell execution including Base64-encoded commands and follow-on script download; VBA-based execution; user and system discovery through commands such as whoami and tasklist; discovery of endpoint security products and EDR tooling; DLL search-order hijacking and sideloading through legitimate executables and services; and privilege escalation via the Fodhelper UAC bypass. The group has also demonstrated post-compromise reconnaissance, process discovery, and broad remote-access backdoor functionality across Windows and Linux environments. Earth Lusca is best characterized as an espionage-motivated Chinese threat actor with broad tooling access, frequent use of shared Chinese intrusion malware ecosystems, and sustained targeting of government and other strategic organizations in the Asia-Pacific region.
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.
65 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
34 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
29 additional families tracked in Mallory.
27 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 27 of them exploited in the wild.
ESET researchers also noted indications that some attacks may involve a UEFI bootkit component, possibly exploiting CVE-2023-24932, which could allow the malware to survive a complete operating system reinstall.
Infection sequences start with the exploitation of known security flaws in public-facing ... Microsoft Exchange Server (ProxyShell) ... servers to drop web shells and deliver Cobalt Strike for lateral movement.
Earth Lusca has used Mimikatz to exploit a domain controller via the ZeroLogon exploit (CVE-2020-1472).
A Chinese advanced persistent threat tracked as Deep Panda has been observed exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerability in VMware Horizon servers to deploy a backdoor and a novel rootkit on infected machines with the goal of stealing sensitive data. The latest set of attacks documented by Fortinet shows that the infection procedure involved the exploitation of the Log4j remote code execution flaw (aka Log4Shell) in vulnerable VMware Horizon servers.
Details on Exploited Vulnerabilities ... CVE-2016-5195 Linux kernel 7.0
22 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
41 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 as a threat actor associated with the generic installation exploitation analytic, but no campaign-specific activity is described in this reference.
Referenced for TTP overlap with similar Chinese-origin post-exploitation tooling targeting government and education sectors.
Listed incidentally in metadata as associated with T1190.
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.