Threat Group Cards: A Threat Actor Encyclopedia

Names	PKPLUG (Palo Alto)
Country	China
Motivation	Information theft and espionage
First seen	2016
Description	(Palo Alto) For three years, Unit 42 has tracked a set of cyber espionage attack campaigns across Asia, which used a mix of publicly available and custom malware. Unit 42 created the moniker “PKPLUG” for the threat actor group, or groups, behind these and other documented attacks referenced later in this report. We say group or groups as our current visibility doesn’t allow us to determine with high confidence if this is the work of one group, or more than one group which uses the same tools and has the same tasking. The name comes from the tactic of delivering PlugX malware inside ZIP archive files as part of a DLL side-loading package. The ZIP file format contains the ASCII magic-bytes “PK” in its header, hence PKPLUG.
Observed	Sectors: Government, Healthcare. Countries: China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Taiwan, Tibet, Vietnam.
Tools used	9002 RAT, Farseer, HenBox, PlugX, Poison Ivy, THOR, Zupdax.
Operations performed	Mar 2021	THOR: Previously Unseen PlugX Variant Deployed During Microsoft Exchange Server Attacks by PKPLUG Group <https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/thor-plugx-variant/>
Information	<https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/pkplug_chinese_cyber_espionage_group_attacking_asia/>
Playbook	<https://pan-unit42.github.io/playbook_viewer/?pb=pkplug>

Last change to this card: 09 August 2021

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