Tropic Trooper

Tropic Trooper, also known as KeyBoy and Pirate Panda, is an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group that has been active since 2011. This China-linked threat actor has been involved in numerous malicious activities, including espionage campaigns targeting Middle Eastern government entities and attacks on Taiwanese financial firms. The group's techniques include the use of the MQTT protocol for network communication with its Command and Control (C2), a method commonly used in Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Tropic Trooper's infrastructure has shown observable overlap with TA413 campaigns, suggesting possible collaboration or shared resources between the two groups. The group's malware has evolved over time, with Trend Micro noting that the 2013 versions of KeyBoy used the same algorithm for encoding configuration files as observed in Operation Tropic Trooper malware. Additionally, there have been cases where DLL hijacking attack chains, primarily utilized by state-sponsored actors like Lazarus Group and Tropic Trooper, were employed for evasion, persistence, and privilege escalation. Tropic Trooper was found to employ a technique that splits the malicious code across several stages, further complicating detection and mitigation efforts. Investigations into Tropic Trooper's activities have revealed more samples written by the group as well as third-party tools used in the post-exploitation phase. One notable event that led to deeper scrutiny of Tropic Trooper was the recurring detection of the China Chopper web shell. It was also discovered that the attackers attempted to launch a loader previously attributed to Tropic Trooper after failing to load it from a .bat file. Current assessments are reevaluating the relationship between Tropic Trooper and the FamousSparrow group, as some industry reports link these two groups together.