Taidoor is a Windows backdoor associated with long-running targeted intrusion activity, particularly espionage-oriented campaigns affecting organizations in the Asia-Pacific region. It has been active since at least 2009 and has been linked to spearphishing operations in which victims are induced to open malicious document attachments. Observed delivery methods include seemingly benign documents and malicious Microsoft Office files exploiting vulnerabilities such as CVE-2012-0158, as well as earlier exploit-document chains associated with Office RTF exploitation.
Once executed, Taidoor provides remote access and host control capabilities typical of an espionage backdoor. Documented functionality includes process discovery, collection of local system time, and collection of network adapter information including MAC address data. It can query and modify the Windows Registry, including use of autorun locations for persistence, and has been observed establishing persistence through a current-user Run key. It also supports file deletion and file upload from compromised hosts, enabling both cleanup and data theft operations.
Taidoor uses native Windows APIs extensively for execution and runtime behavior, including dynamic loading of libraries and API resolution. It can perform DLL loading and has been observed using encrypted or obfuscated strings internally. For command-and-control communications, Taidoor has used HTTP with RC4-encrypted message bodies. The malware has been classified by vendors as a trojan or backdoor, but the directly supported behavior most strongly characterizes it as a backdoor used in targeted attacks against Windows systems.
Mallory pivots from this family to the IOCs, detections, and named campaigns that touch your stack, and pages you when something new lands.
3 CVEs Mallory has correlated with this family across public research and vendor advisories. Each row links to the full Mallory page for that vulnerability.
As in the latter half of 2013, threat actors continued to exploit a bug in Windows Common Controls (CVE-2012-0158) and addressed by Microsoft Security Bulletin MS12-027. The PLEAD campaign against Taiwan ministries, in particular, was such an attack... ESILE variants exploited the same bug that Taidoor malware did, CVE-2012-0158. Note that Microsoft has patched this vulnerability in 2012. | Taidoor: Active since March 2009, the threat actors behind this campaign used a seemingly harmless document that when opened actually executed a malicious file in the background. It also used malicious .DOC files to exploit CVE-2012-0158.
Multiple antivirus detections identify the attached document as exploiting CVE-2010-3333, including 'EXP/CVE-2010-3333', 'Exploit/MSWord.CVE-2010-3333', 'RTF:CVE-2010-3333 [Expl]', 'CVE-2010-3333!Camelot', and 'Exploit:Win32/CVE-2010-3333'. | DrWeb 5.0.2.03300 2011.10.06 Trojan.Taidoor
A zero-day vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 was also exploited in a targeted attack this April prior to the end of support for the OSs. The said zero-day bug was patched via MS14-002 a couple of days after. The threat actors behind the Taidoor Campaign, active since 2008, took advantage of a Microsoft Office vulnerability this May.
25 distinct techniques documented for this family, organized by ATT&CK tactic.
Payload File name:payload.exe ... NOD32 ... a variant of Win32/Injector.JQA
The content repeatedly describes threat actors and malware using cmd.exe, the Windows command shell, to execute commands, launch payloads, run batch files, and automate actions on compromised hosts.
The content is a MITRE ATT&CK-style listing of many malware families and threat groups using Windows/native OS APIs for execution, injection, discovery, anti-debugging, and other actions, ending with 'NtCreateProcess' and 'fork()'.
AntiVir 7.11.15.74 2011.09.29 EXP/CVE-2010-3333 ... Microsoft 1.7702 2011.09.29 Exploit:Win32/CVE-2010-3333
has attempted to get victims to launch malicious Microsoft Word attachments delivered via spearphishing emails... has required user execution of a malicious MSI installer... has been executed through user installation of an executable disguised as a flash installer.
Sandworm Team leveraged Microsoft Office attachments which contained malicious macros that were automatically executed once the user permitted them... APT29 has used various forms of spearphishing attempting to get a user to open attachments... DarkGate is distributed through phishing links to VBS or MSI objects requiring user interaction for execution.
ADVSTORESHELL is capable of setting and deleting Registry values. Agent Tesla can achieve persistence by modifying Registry key entries. APT41 used a malware variant called GOODLUCK to modify the registry in order to steal credentials.
ADVSTORESHELL achieves persistence by adding itself to the HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Registry key... APT28 has deployed malware that has copied itself to the startup directory for persistence... FIN7 malware has created Registry Run and RunOnce keys to establish persistence, and has also added items to the Startup folder.
Aria-body has the ability to inject itself into another process such as rundll32.exe and dllhost.exe... BlackEnergy injects its DLL component into svchost.exe... ComRAT has injected its orchestrator DLL into explorer.exe... Stuxnet injects an entire DLL into an existing, newly created, or preselected trusted process.
ADVSTORESHELL achieves persistence by adding itself to the HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Registry key... APT28 has deployed malware that has copied itself to the startup directory for persistence... FIN7 malware has created Registry Run and RunOnce keys to establish persistence, and has also added items to the Startup folder.
The content repeatedly describes payloads, strings, configuration files, scripts, URLs, and binaries being obfuscated or encoded using Base64, XOR, RC4, AES, RSA, hex encoding, custom algorithms, and other methods across many malware families and threat actors.
Examples throughout the content include 'encrypted payloads decrypted and executed in memory,' 'encrypts its configuration file,' 'AES-encrypted resource,' 'RC4 encrypted embedded scripts,' and 'payload includes an encrypted main component.'
Aria-body has the ability to inject itself into another process such as rundll32.exe and dllhost.exe... BlackEnergy injects its DLL component into svchost.exe... ComRAT has injected its orchestrator DLL into explorer.exe... Stuxnet injects an entire DLL into an existing, newly created, or preselected trusted process.
The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors querying, enumerating, opening, and reading Windows Registry keys and values, e.g., "APT41 queried registry values to determine items such as configured RDP ports and network configurations" and "Reg may be used to gather details from the Windows Registry of a local or remote system at the command-line interface."
AdFind can extract subnet information from Active Directory; actors used ipconfig /all, netsh.exe, ifconfig, arp, route, nbtstat, and related APIs/commands to gather IP, MAC, DNS, DHCP, gateway, proxy, routing, ARP, and adapter information.
Tasklist can be used to discover processes running on a system. Numerous malware families and threat groups are described as listing running processes, collecting PIDs, checking for specific process names, or enumerating loaded modules.
The content is a long ATT&CK-style listing of groups and malware that can 'list files and directories,' 'search for files,' 'enumerate drives,' 'gather file metadata,' or 'browse file systems' on compromised hosts.
The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors collecting the current date, time, or time zone from victim systems, including examples such as "The net time command can be used... to determine the local or remote system time" and commands like "net time \\hostname" and "w32tm /tz".
Andariel has collected large numbers of files from compromised network systems for later extraction... APT28 has retrieved internal documents from machines inside victim environments... BADNEWS crawls the victim's local drives and collects documents... many listed groups and malware collect files, documents, credentials, payment card data, or other information from compromised hosts.
The content is a long ATT&CK-style listing showing numerous malware families and threat groups that 'use HTTP,' 'use HTTPS,' 'HTTP POST requests,' 'HTTP GET requests,' or 'HTTP/S' for command and control communications. | Specific implementations mentioned include 'HTTP POST requests,' 'HTTP GET requests,' 'custom HTTP cookies,' 'Cookie HTTP header,' 'HTTP Upgrade request' for WebSocket initiation, and use of APIs such as 'Microsoft Graph API' or 'Dropbox HTTP API' for C2.
The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors that can "download files from C2," "download additional payloads," "upload and download files," "retrieve payloads from the C2 server," and "copy files to remote machines."
44 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Taidoor (Roudan) is a backdoor used by APT24 and Earth Aughisky for persistent access and espionage.
Named malware family referenced with aliases G0015 and Earth Aughisky.
Collects MAC addresses and identifies network adapters using GetAdaptersInfo.
Software changes: ... Taidoor
Match every observed IP, domain, and hash against your live telemetry.
Named campaigns wielding this family, with evidence pinned to each claim.
CVEs this family uses for access and lateral movement.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Every documented technique, ranked by evidence weight.
Reddit, Mastodon, and CTI community discussion around this family.