Mustang Panda is a China-based cyber espionage threat actor that has been conducting operations since at least 2012. Mustang Panda has been known to use tailored phishing lures and decoy documents to deliver malicious payloads. Mustang Panda has targeted government, diplomatic, and non-governmental organizations, including think tanks, religious institutions, and research entities, across the United States, Europe, and Asia, with notable activity in Russia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Vietnam. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]
85
TechniquesTop 2%
14
TacticsTop 6%
23
Tools & malwareTop 5%
1
Campaignunranked
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
Mustang Panda has utilized TLS record headers in network packets to impersonate various versions of TLS protocols to blend in with legitimate network traffic. Mustang Panda has used FakeTLS to communicate with its C2 servers.14
Mustang Panda has used vssadmin to create a volume shadow copy and retrieve the NTDS.dit file. Mustang Panda has also used reg save on the SYSTEM file Registry location to help extract the NTDS.dit file.1718
Mustang Panda has used ipconfig and arp to determine network configuration information.20Mustang Panda has also utilized SharpNBTScan to scan the victim environment.21
Discovery25 detection rules
Standing G0129
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this group 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 176 ATT&CK groups 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
Techniques85Top 2%
98th percentile · 98% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics14Top 6%
94th percentile · 94% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many tactics spanned or fewer.
Tools & malware23Top 5%
95th percentile · 95% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many tools and malware or fewer.
Campaign189% tie · 4 values
89% of the population shares a single value across only 4 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique12med31st pct
31st percentile · 69% of 176 ATT&CK groups have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique2med34th pct
34th percentile · 66% of 176 ATT&CK groups have more atomic tests per technique.
Data comps / technique4med65% tie · 12 values
65% of the population shares a single value across only 12 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Mitigations / technique2med43% tie · 11 values
43% of the population shares a single value across only 11 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
5 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this group’s 85 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
An adversary may use legitimate desktop support and remote access software, such as Team Viewer, Go2Assist, LogMein, AmmyyAdmin, etc, to establish an interactive command and control channel to target systems within networks. (...)
Detects when AppLocker "Audit only" enforcement mode reports that an Application, DLL, Script, MSI, or Packaged-App would have been blocked if AppLocker "Enforce rules" enforcement mode was enabled.
The following analytic detects the execution of tools commonly exploited by cybercriminals, such as those used for unauthorized access, network scanning, privilege escalation, password dumping or data exfiltration. (...)