The risk actor often known as Patchwork has been attributed to a brand new spear-phishing marketing campaign concentrating on Turkish protection contractors with the purpose of gathering strategic intelligence.
“The marketing campaign employs a five-stage execution chain delivered through malicious LNK information disguised as convention invites despatched to targets enthusiastic about studying extra about unmanned car techniques,” Arctic Wolf Labs stated in a technical report printed this week.
The exercise, which additionally singled out an unnamed producer of precision-guided missile techniques, seems to be geopolitically motivated because the timing coincides amid deepening protection cooperation between Pakistan and Türkiye, and the current India-Pakistan navy skirmishes.
Patchwork, additionally known as APT-C-09, APT-Q-36, Chinastrats, Dropping Elephant, Operation Hangover, Quilted Tiger, and Zinc Emerson, is assessed to be a state-sponsored actor of Indian origin. Recognized to be energetic since not less than 2009, the hacking group has a monitor report of hanging entities in China, Pakistan, and different international locations in South Asia.
Precisely a yr in the past, the Knownsec 404 Workforce documented Patchwork’s concentrating on entities with ties to Bhutan to ship the Brute Ratel C4 framework and an up to date model of a backdoor known as PGoShell.
Because the begin of 2025, the risk actor has been linked to varied campaigns aimed toward Chinese language universities, with current assaults utilizing baits associated to energy grids within the nation to ship a Rust-based loader that, in flip, decrypts and launches a C# trojan known as Protego to reap a variety of knowledge from compromised Home windows techniques.
One other report printed by Chinese language cybersecurity agency QiAnXin again in Could stated it recognized infrastructure overlaps between Patchwork and DoNot Workforce (aka APT-Q-38 or Bellyworm), suggesting potential operational connections between the 2 risk clusters.
The concentrating on of Türkiye by the hacking group factors to an enlargement of its concentrating on footprint, utilizing malicious Home windows shortcut (LNK) information distributed through phishing emails as a place to begin to kick-off the multi-stage an infection course of.
Particularly, the LNK file is designed to invoke PowerShell instructions which might be answerable for fetching extra payloads from an exterior server (“expouav[.]org”), a website created on June 25, 2025, that hosts a PDF lure mimicking a world convention on unmanned car techniques, particulars of that are hosted on the reliable waset[.]org web site.
“The PDF doc serves as a visible decoy, designed to distract the consumer whereas the remainder of the execution chain runs silently within the background,” Arctic Wolf stated. “This concentrating on happens as Türkiye instructions 65% of the worldwide UAV export market and develops important hypersonic missile capabilities, whereas concurrently strengthening protection ties with Pakistan throughout a interval of heightened India-Pakistan tensions.”
Among the many downloaded artifacts is a malicious DLL that is launched utilizing DLL side-loading by the use of a scheduled process, in the end resulting in the execution of shellcode that carries out in depth reconnaissance of the compromised host, together with taking screenshots, and exfiltrating the main points again to the server.
“This represents a big evolution of this risk actor’s capabilities, transitioning from the x64 DLL variants noticed in November 2024, to the present x86 PE executables with enhanced command constructions,” the corporate stated. “Dropping Elephant demonstrates continued operational funding and improvement by architectural diversification from x64 DLL to x86 PE codecs, and enhanced C2 protocol implementation by impersonation of reliable web sites.”