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Red Heron is a Chinese-speaking threat actor conducting multinational exploitation campaigns against internet-facing infrastructure. Its documented targeting includes defense, elections, government, energy, aerospace, telecommunications, financial services, industrial automation, and information technology. Confirmed compromises include organizations in Taiwan, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Qatar, and Sri Lanka. Its geographic origin and state sponsorship are not established at high confidence. In July 2026, Red Heron rapidly operationalized public exploit code for CVE-2026-60004, a critical remote-code-execution vulnerability in Gitea. Its automated framework registered accounts, exploited vulnerable servers, stole repositories, and removed selected database traces. The actor scanned 1,386 Gitea instances across seven countries and maintained a separate reconnaissance dataset of 477 Taiwan-based systems. Intrusions progressed from source-code theft to credential and token collection, SSH-key persistence, backdoor deployment, infrastructure discovery, and lateral movement. At a Canadian renewable-energy organization, it stole application code, configuration secrets, authentication tokens, and SSH material. In Taiwan, it obtained root-level administrative access to a three-node Proxmox cluster and initiated virtual-machine backups. Separate activity targeted Joomla websites, including an Indian education consultancy and a US managed service provider. Red Heron's tooling includes JITTERLY, a C++ Linux implant supporting command execution, file transfer, interactive terminals, port scanning, network tunneling, and internal pivoting. JITTERLY uses encrypted raw-TCP command-and-control communications and embeds SIXZUT, an LD_PRELOAD rootkit. SIXZUT conceals files, processes, and network connections, obstructs termination of protected processes, and can relaunch the implant. These capabilities support covert persistence and extended post-exploitation access.
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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.
58 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
7 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
2 additional families tracked in Mallory.
12 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 12 of them exploited in the wild.
El aviso registra explotación de CVE-2026-60004 en Gitea el 30 de julio de 2026.
El actor explotó CVE-2026-7273 —primer caso documentado de explotación activa— en switches ZyXEL GS1900, comprometiendo 996 equipos en 48 países y extrayendo configuraciones y credenciales.
CVE-2026-34908 de Ubiquiti UniFi OS fue incluida en una cadena de vulnerabilidades observada para la instalación de backdoors.
CVE-2026-34909 de Ubiquiti UniFi OS figura como parte de una cadena de vulnerabilidades en la campaña.
CVE-2026-34910 de Ubiquiti UniFi OS figura como parte de una cadena de vulnerabilidades en la campaña.
7 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
25 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
14 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Previously associated with exploitation of a Gitea zero-day vulnerability against more than 100 organizations worldwide.
A threat group linked in this reference to exploitation of a critical Gitea vulnerability. The primary campaign was conducted by a Chinese-speaking actor described as related to Red Heron, rather than being directly attributed to Red Heron.
A Chinese-linked activity cluster assessed as identical or closely related to Red Heron exploited a ZyXEL GS1900 switch vulnerability to exfiltrate hashed root credentials, device configurations, and network data from 996 devices across 48 countries. The activity also included exploitation of a Ubiquiti vulnerability chain for remote code execution and targeting of WordPress installations, including theft of more than 18,000 sensitive records from a Western government organization.
A previously documented activity cluster linked to the unnamed attacker behind the reported WordPress and ZyXEL compromises through shared infrastructure, malware, and targeting patterns. The article does not definitively attribute these attacks to Red Heron or identify specific malware or vulnerabilities used by that cluster.
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.