Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to malicious activity orchestrated by a China-nexus cyber espionage group known as Murky Panda that involves abusing trusted relationships in the cloud to breach enterprise networks.
“The adversary has also shown considerable ability to quickly weaponize N-day and zero-day vulnerabilities and frequently achieves initial access to their targets by exploiting internet-facing appliances,” CrowdStrike said in a Thursday report.
Murky Panda, also known as Silk Typhoon (formerly Hafnium), is best known for its zero-day exploitation of Microsoft Exchange Server flaws in 2021. Attacks mounted by the hacking group have targeted government, technology, academic, legal, and professional services entities in North America.
Earlier this March, Microsoft detailed the threat actor’s shift in tactics, detailing its targeting of the information technology (IT) supply chain as a means to obtain initial access to corporate networks. It’s assessed that Murky Panda’s operations are driven by intelligence gathering.
Like other Chinese hacking groups, Murky Panda has exploited internet-facing appliances to obtain initial access and is believed to have also compromised small office/home office (SOHO) devices that are geolocated in the targeted country as an exit node to hinder detection efforts.
Other infection pathways include exploitation of known security flaws in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway (CVE-2023-3519) and Commvault (CVE-2025-3928). The initial access is leveraged to deploy web shells like neo-reGeorg to establish persistence and ultimately drop a custom malware called CloudedHope.
A 64-bit ELF binary and written in Golang, CloudedHope functions as a basic remote access tool (RAT) while employing anti-analysis and operational security (OPSEC) measures, such as modifying timestamps and deleting indicators of their presence in victim environments to fly under the radar.
But a notable aspect of Murky Panda’s tradecraft concerns the abuse of trusted relationships between partner organizations and their cloud tenants, exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities to breach software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers’ cloud environments and conduct lateral movement to downstream victims.
In at least one instance observed in late 2024, the threat actor is said to have compromised a supplier of a North American entity and used the supplier’s administrative access to the victim entity’s Entra ID tenant to add a temporary backdoor Entra ID account.
“Using this account, the threat actor then backdoored several preexisting Entra ID service principles related to Active Directory management and emails,” CrowdStrike said. “The adversary’s goals appear targeted in nature based on their focus on accessing emails.”
From Murky to Genesis
Another China-linked threat actor that has proven skilful at manipulating cloud services is Genesis Panda, which has been observed using the infrastructure for basic exfiltration and…
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