G0093: GALLIUM
GALLIUM is a cyberespionage group that has been active since at least 2012, primarily targeting telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and government entities in Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Russia, and Vietnam. This group is particularly known for launching Operation Soft Cell, a long-term campaign targeting telecommunications providers.[1] Security researchers have identified GALLIUM as a likely Chinese state-sponsored group, based in part on tools used and TTPs commonly associated with Chinese threat actors.[1][2][3]
Security context for executives and security teams
G0093: GALLIUM describes [GALLIUM](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0093) is a cyberespionage group that has been active since at least 2012, primarily targeting telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and government entities in Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Russia, and Vietnam. This group is particularly known for launching Operation Soft Cell, a long-term campaign targeting telecommunications providers.(Citation: Cybereason Soft Cell June 2019) Security researchers have id...
Executive priority
G0093: GALLIUM is an official MITRE ATT&CK group. Glexia treats it as defensive behavior context for prioritizing monitoring, control validation, and response planning without using the object by itself as an attribution claim.
Technical view
Security teams should validate G0093: GALLIUM by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (the mapped ATT&CK tactic context), supported platforms (the platforms named in the official object), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.
Likely telemetry
- Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata
Detection direction
- Validate whether G0093: GALLIUM appears in your detection coverage and tabletop scenarios.
- Use the object to align executive risk language with SOC, incident response, and detection engineering work.
- Do not treat ATT&CK relationship context as attribution without corroborating evidence.
Mitigation priorities
- Map the object to existing controls and identify missing telemetry or response ownership.
- Prioritize mitigations that reduce exposure on the listed platforms and tactics.
- Review adjacent ATT&CK relationships before changing policy, detections, or reporting language.
Additional notes and limits
Baseline Glexia take generated from the official MITRE ATT&CK STIX object, source hash, tactics, platforms, and detection fields. It is safe to replace with a richer model-generated take for the same source hash later.
This baseline take is source-grounded and schema-validated, but it does not include environment-specific telemetry, incident evidence, or threat-intelligence corroboration.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
GALLIUM
GALLIUM is a cyberespionage group that has been active since at least 2012, primarily targeting telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and government entities in Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Russia, and Vietnam. This group is particularly known for launching Operation Soft Cell, a long-term campaign targeting telecommunications providers.[1] Security researchers have identified GALLIUM as a likely Chinese state-sponsored group, based in part on tools used and TTPs commonly associated with Chinese threat actors.[1][2][3]
How security teams should use this page
Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.
Techniques used
This mirrors the MITRE pattern of making group, software, campaign, and technique relationships scannable. Relationship notes come from mirrored ATT&CK relationship text when available.
Groups, software, and campaigns
S0100: ipconfig
S0097: Ping
S0106: cmd
cmd is the Windows command-line interpreter that can be used to interact with systems and execute other processes and utilities. [1]
Cmd.exe contains native functionality to perform many operations to interact with the system, including listing files in a directory (e.g., dir [2]), deleting files (e.g., del [3]), and copying files (e.g., copy [4]).
S0020: China Chopper
S0012: PoisonIvy
S0110: at
S0013: PlugX
S1031: PingPull
PingPull is a remote access Trojan (RAT) written in Visual C++ that has been used by GALLIUM since at least June 2022. PingPull has been used to target telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and government entities in Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Russia, and Vietnam.[1]
S0564: BlackMould
BlackMould is a web shell based on China Chopper for servers running Microsoft IIS. First reported in December 2019, it has been used in malicious campaigns by GALLIUM against telecommunication providers.[1]
S0002: Mimikatz
S0039: Net
The Net utility is a component of the Windows operating system. It is used in command-line operations for control of users, groups, services, and network connections. [1]
Net has a great deal of functionality, [2] much of which is useful for an adversary, such as gathering system and network information for Discovery, moving laterally through SMB/Windows Admin Shares using net use commands, and interacting with services. The net1.exe utility is executed for certain functionality when net.exe is run and can be used directly in commands such as net1 user.
S0075: Reg
All related ATT&CK context
Object version and sync metadata
The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates.
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
| Release | Bundle imported | Object version | Modified | Status | Raw hash |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19.2 | 4.0 | Current bundle | 7a57970b73f1… | ||
| 19.1 | 4.0 | Older bundle | f7f0b61608b5… |
Mirrored ATT&CK source object
The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.
External references and citations
MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.
- [1]Cybereason Soft Cell June 2019
Cybereason Nocturnus. (2019, June 25). Operation Soft Cell: A Worldwide Campaign Against Telecommunications Providers. Retrieved July 18, 2019.
Open source URL - [2]Microsoft GALLIUM December 2019
MSTIC. (2019, December 12). GALLIUM: Targeting global telecom. Retrieved January 13, 2021.
Open source URL - [3]Unit 42 PingPull Jun 2022
Unit 42. (2022, June 13). GALLIUM Expands Targeting Across Telecommunications, Government and Finance Sectors With New PingPull Tool. Retrieved August 7, 2022.
Open source URL - [4]GALLIUM
(Citation: Microsoft GALLIUM December 2019)
- [5]Granite Typhoon
(Citation: Microsoft Threat Actor Naming July 2023)
- [6]Microsoft Threat Actor Naming July 2023
Microsoft . (2023, July 12). How Microsoft names threat actors. Retrieved November 17, 2023.
Open source URL - [7]mitre-attackG0093Open source URL
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