ToddyCat
ToddyCat (Websiic / Storm-0247 / G1022) is a suspected China-aligned advanced persistent threat group operationally active since at least December 2020, first publicly disclosed by Kaspersky GReAT (Giampaolo Dedola) on June 21, 2022 after over 18 months of undetected operations.
despite consistent China-speaking-actor TTPs, victim overlap with FunnyDream operators, and target-profile alignment with PRC regional intelligence priorities, no formal government attribution has been published, Kaspersky explicitly noted inability to attribute the cluster to other known actors.
initial targeting (December 22, 2020) compromised three organizations' Microsoft Exchange servers in Taiwan and Vietnam using an unidentified vulnerability (likely pre-disclosure ProxyLogon access given infection-chain reuse), with aggressive ProxyLogon-based expansion starting February 26, 2021 into Europe and Asia (Russia, India, Iran, UK, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan added 2021-2022) and September 2021 expansion from Exchange servers to desktop systems of government and diplomatic entities in Central Asia via Telegram-delivered Ninja-trojan ZIP archives.
tradecraft hallmarks include the Samurai signature passive C# .NET HTTPListener backdoor on ports 80/443 executing runtime-decrypted C# source code, the Ninja C++ post-exploitation toolkit with collaborative-multi-operator design and Cobalt-Strike-like pivot listeners with Malleable-C2-like camouflage profiles, registry manipulation forcing svchost.exe to load Samurai at startup, DLL side- loading via VLC media player, a passive UDP backdoor, a multi-tunnel access-resilience architecture (reverse SSH + SoftEther VPN + Ngrok cloud-infrastructure C2 redirection), Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver via the TCESB tool exploiting ESET security scanners, industrial-scale data-theft tooling (TomBerBil PowerShell credential harvester from domain controllers, Cuthead file-search and archive collection, WAExp WhatsApp Web browser local-storage exfiltration, TCSectorCopy direct volume access bypassing Outlook PST/OST file locks, SharpTokenFinder M365 OAuth 2.0 token theft), executable masquerading (VPN servers renamed as Kaspersky or Lenovo updates), AES-128 payload encryption, and scheduled- task-driven recurring collection, targets are overwhelmingly government, diplomatic, and military entities including defense contractors across Asia-Pacific, Central Asia, and Europe, with Kaspersky April 2024 characterizing the cluster as conducting industrial-scale data theft.