- 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.
Western sources
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