Skip to content
Install MCP

Threat actor

RedDelta

Last fetched

RedDelta is a threat actor tracked in WhisperGraph's MITRE ATT&CK corpus, observed using 85 techniques.

Description

Likely Chinese state-sponsored threat activity group RedDelta targeting organizations within Europe and Southeast Asia using a customized variant of the PlugX backdoor. Since at least 2019, RedDelta has been consistently active within Southeast Asia, particularly in Myanmar and Vietnam, but has also routinely adapted its targeting in response to global geopolitical events. This is historically evident through the group’s targeting of the Vatican and other Catholic organizations in the lead-up to 2021 talks between Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Vatican officials, as well as throughout 2022 through the group’s shift towards increased targeting of European government and diplomatic entities following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the 3-month period from September through November 2022, RedDelta has regularly used an infection chain employing malicious shortcut (LNK) files, which trigger a dynamic-link library (DLL) search-order-hijacking execution chain to load consistently updated PlugX versions. Throughout this period, the group repeatedly employed decoy documents specific to government and migration policy within Europe. Of note, we identified a European government department focused on trade communicating with RedDelta command-and-control (C2) infrastructure in early August 2022. This activity commenced on the same day that a RedDelta PlugX sample using this C2 infrastructure and featuring an EU trade-themed decoy document surfaced on public malware repositories. We also identified additional probable victim entities within Myanmar and Vietnam regularly communicating with RedDelta C2 infrastructure. RedDelta closely overlaps with public industry reporting under the aliases BRONZE PRESIDENT, Mustang Panda, TA416, Red Lich, and HoneyMyte.

Techniques by tactic

Collection

Command and Control

Credential Access

Defense Impairment

Discovery

Execution

Exfiltration

Initial Access

Lateral Movement

Persistence

Privilege Escalation

Reconnaissance

Resource Development

Stealth

Attributed infrastructure

None published. WhisperGraph carries no ATTRIBUTED_TO edge to RedDelta today — this states the absence of a published link, not that RedDelta has no infrastructure.

References

© The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation.

Related pages

Pivot from RedDelta into its techniques, tactics and any attributed infrastructure.

Queries

Resolves the slug to this actor, merging every duplicate node sharing the same name.


MATCH (a:ACTOR)
WHERE a.name =~ $pattern OR any(x IN a.aliases WHERE x =~ $pattern)
RETURN a.id AS id, a.name AS name, a.aliases AS aliases, a.description AS description,
       a.references AS references, a.campaigns AS campaigns
LIMIT 25
Run yourself →

Techniques this actor uses, grouped by the tactic each one serves.


MATCH (a:ACTOR {name: $name})-[:USES_TECHNIQUE]->(t:ATTACK_PATTERN)
OPTIONAL MATCH (t)-[:USES_TACTIC]->(tac:ATTACK_PATTERN)
RETURN t.id AS techniqueId, t.name AS techniqueName, tac.id AS tacticId, tac.name AS tacticName
LIMIT 1000
Run yourself →

Infrastructure publicly attributed to this actor.


MATCH (n)-[:ATTRIBUTED_TO]->(a:ACTOR {name: $name})
RETURN labels(n)[0] AS kind, n.name AS name
LIMIT 25
Run yourself →

Or query Whisper from your own LLM workflow via the Whisper MCP server.