GINC-APT-0939 · Targeted, sponsor unknown

SilkParasite

Category
Targeted, sponsor unknown · Targeted intrusions with no sponsor attributed.
Origin
China(high confidence)
Sources
3 sources carry it
Identifier
GINC-APT-0939 · silkparasite

What it is

SilkParasite is an activity cluster tracked by Bitdefender across Central Asia, primarily targeting government and telecommunications entities in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Bitdefender assesses a China-nexus with medium confidence and states explicitly that it does not believe the evidence supports attribution to a named group, so this is recorded as an activity cluster rather than as an established actor. Observed tooling spans seven implant families: five named by Bitdefender (DriveSilkRAT, CookiETagRAT, NomadRAT, GoginRAT, NodeEdgeRAT) plus SpiceRAT, previously reported by Cisco Talos in connection with SneakyChef, and BloodAlchemy, a lineage descended from ShadowPad and Deed RAT. The operators favour DLL sideloading and cloud services as command-and-control channels, and register domains impersonating local hosting providers.

Attribution

Each attribution is a claim: who makes it, and to whom. Western and Eastern sources are kept apart, as they often disagree.

Tools

The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.

  • China Chopper
  • CloudDuke
  • CrossRat
  • MadRAT
  • Parasite-HTTP-RAT
  • drat

Sources

  • Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de