🇨🇳

PurpleHaze

APT Group Information theft and espionage 2 zero-day CVEs ETDA ✓

Also Known As

No alias recorded

Target Countries

No target country recorded

Sectors Targeted

No targeted sector recorded

Details

Origin 🇨🇳 CN

Last Updated 17 May 2025

MITRE ATT&CK 79

T1003 T1003.001 T1003.002 T1003.003 T1003.004 T1005 T1007 T1016 T1018 T1020 T1021 T1021.002 T1027 T1033 T1036 T1036.002 T1036.004 T1036.005 T1041 T1046 T1049 T1055 T1055.001 T1056 T1056.001 T1057 T1059 T1059.003 T1069 T1069.002 T1071 T1071.001 T1071.004 T1074 T1074.001 T1078 T1078.004 T1082 T1083 T1087 T1087.001 T1087.002 T1090 T1090.003 T1095 T1105 T1114 T1114.002 T1119 T1120 T1133 T1140 T1190 T1213 T1213.002 T1505 T1505.003 T1543 T1543.003 T1547 T1547.001 T1558 T1558.001 T1560 T1560.001 T1569 T1569.002 T1574 T1574.001 T1583 T1583.003 T1583.005 T1587 T1587.001 T1588 T1588.001 T1588.002 T1614 T1614.001

Related Zero-Days 2

CVE-2024-8190 CVE-2024-8963

Known Names 21 entries

Ke3chang FireEye

Vixen Panda CrowdStrike

APT 15 Mandiant

GREF SecureWorks

Bronze Palace SecureWorks

Bronze Davenport SecureWorks

Bronze Idlewood SecureWorks

CTG-9246 SecureWorks

Playful Dragon FireEye

Royal APT NCC Group

Nickel Microsoft

BackdoorDiplomacy ESET

Playful Taurus Palo Alto

Metushy ?

Social Network Team ?

Nylon Typhoon Microsoft

Flea Symantec

Red Vulture PWC

PurpleHaze SentinelOne

G0004 MITRE

G0135 MITRE

Observed Target Countries 57

Based on ETDA data — countries highlighted in red

Afghanistan Albania Argentina Barbados Belgium Bhutan Bosnia and Herzegovina Brazil Bulgaria Chile China Colombia Croatia Czech Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador France Georgia Germany Ghana Guatemala Honduras Hungary India Indonesia Iran Italy Jamaica Kazakhstan Kuwait Libya Malaysia Mali Mexico Montenegro Namibia Nigeria Pakistan Panama Peru Poland Portugal Saudi Arabia Slovakia South Africa Sri Lanka Switzerland Syria Trinidad and Tobago Turkey UAE UK USA Uzbekistan Venezuela

Description

Ke3chang is a threat group attributed to actors operating out of China. Ke3chang has targeted several industries, including oil, government, military, and more.

Tools Used 37

BS2005 CarbonSteal Cobalt Strike DarthPusher EarthWorm EternalBlue DoubleAgent GoldenEagle Graphican HenBox HighNoon IRAFAU Ketrican Ketrum Mimikatz MirageFox MS Exchange Tool nbtscan netcat Okrum PluginPhantom PortQry ProcDump PsList RoyalCli RoyalDNS SilkBean Sinowal SMBTouch spwebmember SpyWaller TidePool Turian Winnti XSLCmd Living off the Land EternalRocks and EternalSynergy

Operations 14

2010 Operation “Ke3chang” As the crisis in Syria escalates, FireEye research-ers have discovered a cyber espionage campaign, which we call “Ke3chang,” that falsely advertises information updates about the ongoing crisis to compromise MFA networks in Europe. We believe that the Ke3chang attackers are operating out of China and have been active since at least 2010. However, we believe specific Syria-themed attacks against MFAs (codenamed by Ke3chang as “moviestar”) began only in August 2013. The timing of the attacks precedes a G20 meeting held in Russia that focused on the crisis in Syria. https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/global/en/current-threats/pdfs/wp-operation-ke3chang.pdf

2014-08 Forced to Adapt: XSLCmd Backdoor Now on OS X https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2014/09/forced-to-adapt-xslcmd-backdoor-now-on-os-x.html

2015 The Lookout Threat Intelligence team has discovered four Android surveillanceware tools, which are used to target the Uyghur ethnic minority group. Our research indicates that these four interconnected malware tools are elements of much larger mAPT (mobile advanced persistent threat) campaigns that have been active for years. Although there is evidence that the campaigns have been active since at least 2013, Lookout researchers have been monitoring the surveillanceware families — SilkBean, DoubleAgent, CarbonSteal and GoldenEagle — as far back as 2015. https://www.lookout.com/documents/threat-reports/us/lookout-uyghur-malware-tr-us.pdf

2016-05 Little has been published on the threat actors responsible for Operation Ke3chang since the report was released more than two years ago. However, Unit 42 has recently discovered the actors have continued to evolve their custom malware arsenal. We’ve discovered a new malware family we’ve named TidePool. It has strong behavioral ties to Ke3chang and is being used in an ongoing attack campaign against Indian embassy personnel worldwide. This targeting is also consistent with previous attacker TTPs; Ke3chang historically targeted the Ministry of Affairs, and also conducted several prior campaigns against India. https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/operation-ke3chang-resurfaces-with-new-tidepool-malware/

2017-05 Attack on a company that provides a range of services to UK Government A number of sensitive documents were stolen by the attackers during the incident and we believe APT15 was targeting information related to UK government departments and military technology. During our analysis of the compromise, we identified new backdoors that now appear to be part of APT15’s toolset. The backdoor BS2005 – which has traditionally been used by the group – now appears alongside the additional backdoors RoyalCli and RoyalDNS. https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2018/march/apt15-is-alive-and-strong-an-analysis-of-royalcli-and-royaldns/

2017 BackdoorDiplomacy: Upgrading from Quarian to Turian https://www.welivesecurity.com/2021/06/10/backdoordiplomacy-upgrading-quarian-turian/

2018-06 Operation “MirageFox” The malware involved in this recent campaign, MirageFox, looks to be an upgraded version of a tool, a RAT believed to originate in 2012, known as Mirage. https://www.intezer.com/miragefox-apt15-resurfaces-with-new-tools-based-on-old-ones/

2019-03 The group continues to be active in 2019 – in March 2019, we detected a new Ketrican sample that has evolved from the 2018 Ketrican backdoor. It attacked the same targets as the backdoor from 2018. https://www.welivesecurity.com/2019/07/18/okrum-ke3chang-targets-diplomatic-missions/

2019-09 NICKEL targeting government organizations across Latin America and Europe https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/12/06/nickel-targeting-government-organizations-across-latin-america-and-europe/

2020-05 In mid May, we identified three recently uploaded samples from VirusTotal that share code with older APT15 implants. We named this new family of samples, “Ketrum”, due to the merger of features in the documented backdoor families “Ketrican” and “Okrum”. https://www.intezer.com/blog/research/the-evolution-of-apt15s-codebase-2020/

2021-08 BackdoorDiplomacy Wields New Tools in Fresh Middle East Campaign https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/labs/backdoor-diplomacy-wields-new-tools-in-fresh-middle-east-campaign/

2022-04 Chinese Playful Taurus Activity in Iran https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/playful-taurus/

2022 Late Graphican: Flea Uses New Backdoor in Attacks Targeting Foreign Ministries https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/flea-backdoor-microsoft-graph-apt15

2024-10 Follow the Smoke | China-nexus Threat Actors Hammer At the Doors of Top Tier Targets https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/follow-the-smoke-china-nexus-threat-actors-hammer-at-the-doors-of-top-tier-targets/

Reports & References 1

https://github.com/nccgroup/Royal_APT

ETDA Profile

Ke3chang, Vixen Panda, APT 15, GREF, Playful Dragon

Origin

China

First Seen 2010

Sponsor State-sponsored

Motivation

Information theft and espionage

MITRE ATT&CK Groups

https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0004/ https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0135/

View on ETDA APT Groups ↗