KV Botnet Activity consisted of exploitation of primarily “end-of-life” small office-home office (SOHO) equipment from manufacturers such as Cisco, NETGEAR, and DrayTek. KV Botnet Activity was used by Volt Typhoon to obfuscate connectivity to victims in multiple critical infrastructure segments, including energy and telecommunication companies and entities based on the US territory of Guam. While the KV Botnet is the most prominent element of this campaign, it overlaps with another botnet cluster referred to as the JDY cluster.[1] This botnet was disrupted by US law enforcement entities in early 2024 after periods of activity from October 2022 through January 2024.[2]
20
Techniques57th pct
8
Tactics48th pct
0
Tools & malwareNone recorded
1
Threat groupunranked
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
KV Botnet Activity installation steps include first identifying, then stopping, any process containing [kworker\/0:1], then renaming its initial installation stage to this process name.5
KV Botnet Activity final payload installation includes mounting and binding to the \/proc\/ filepath on the victim system to enable subsequent operation in memory while also removing on-disk artifacts.6
Scripts associated with KV Botnet Activity initial deployment can identify processes related to security tools and other botnet families for follow-on disabling during installation.7
KV Botnet Activity utilizes multiple Bash scripts during botnet installation stages, and the final botnet payload allows for running commands in the Bash shell.8
Execution31 detection rules
Standing C0035
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this campaign touches. Coverage is how well defended each thing it does is, as a median per technique rather than a total — a total would just restate the reach. Each figure is ranked against all 56 ATT&CK campaigns only where that population actually spreads. Where most of the population shares one value, a percentile would rank the tie instead of the entity, so the raw value is shown and no rank is claimed.
Reach
Techniques2057th pct
57th percentile · 57% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics848th pct
48th percentile · 52% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more tactics spanned.
Tools & malware0Bottom 11%
11th percentile · 89% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more tools and malware.
Threat group155% tie · 3 values
55% of the population shares a single value across only 3 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique9.5med27th pct
27th percentile · 73% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique9medTop 2%
98th percentile · 98% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many atomic tests per technique or fewer.
Data comps / technique4.5med43% tie · 7 values
43% of the population shares a single value across only 7 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Mitigations / technique1med38th pct
38th percentile · 62% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more mitigations per technique.
6 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this campaign’s 20 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
687 distinct rules cover the 20 techniques recorded for this campaign. 437 Sigma · 250 Splunk.
17 covered by at least one rule3 with no coverage687 distinct rules in total
Showing 1-50 of 600+ rules
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Detects when a Microsoft Cloud App Security reported when users were active from an IP address that has been identified as an anonymous proxy IP address.
Detects when a Microsoft Cloud App Security reported when an activity occurs from a location that wasn't recently or never visited by any user in the organization.
Detects successful deletion or disabling of an AWS GuardDuty detector, possibly by an attacker trying to avoid detection of its malicious activities. (...)
Detects the Linux-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency by Axios NPM package, including payload download via curl and detached execution using nohup and python3. (...)
Detects the macOS-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency in Axios NPM Package, including AppleScript execution via osascript, payload download, permission modification, execution, and cleanup.
This analytic detects potential reconnaissance activities on Cisco ASA devices by identifying execution of multiple information-gathering "show" commands within a short timeframe. (...)