LiveActive security incident?Get immediate response
MITRE ATT&CK® Group

G1006: Earth Lusca

Earth Lusca is a suspected China-based cyber espionage group that has been active since at least April 2019. Earth Lusca has targeted organizations in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Nepal, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Germany, France, and the United States. Targets included government institutions, news media outlets, gambling companies, educational institutions, COVID-19 research organizations, telecommunications companies, religious movements banned in China, and cryptocurrency trading platforms; security researchers assess some Earth Lusca operations may be financially motivated.[1]

Earth Lusca has used malware commonly used by other Chinese threat groups, including APT41 and the Winnti Group cluster, however security researchers assess Earth Lusca's techniques and infrastructure are separate.[1]

EnterpriseG1006GroupObject v2.1Modified
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis

Security context for executives and security teams

Automation confidenceMedium

G1006: Earth Lusca describes [Earth Lusca](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G1006) is a suspected China-based cyber espionage group that has been active since at least April 2019. [Earth Lusca](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G1006) has targeted organizations in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Nepal, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Germany, France, and the United States. Targets included government institutions, news media outlets, gambling companies, educational institutions, COVID-19 resea...

Executive priority

G1006: Earth Lusca 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 G1006: Earth Lusca 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 G1006: Earth Lusca 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.

Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Earth Lusca

Earth Lusca is a suspected China-based cyber espionage group that has been active since at least April 2019. Earth Lusca has targeted organizations in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Nepal, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Germany, France, and the United States. Targets included government institutions, news media outlets, gambling companies, educational institutions, COVID-19 research organizations, telecommunications companies, religious movements banned in China, and cryptocurrency trading platforms; security researchers assess some Earth Lusca operations may be financially motivated.[1]

Earth Lusca has used malware commonly used by other Chinese threat groups, including APT41 and the Winnti Group cluster, however security researchers assess Earth Lusca's techniques and infrastructure are separate.[1]

View the same entry on attack.mitre.org (MITRE-hosted reference; in-page links above use the Glexia ATT&CK library.)

Glexia analysis

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.

ATT&CK relationship table

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.

44 rows
DomainIDNameRelationship / procedure
EnterpriseT1583.006Web ServicesSub-technique

Earth Lusca has established GitHub accounts to host their malware.[1]

EnterpriseT1027.003SteganographySub-technique

Earth Lusca has used steganography to hide shellcode in a BMP image file.[1]

EnterpriseT1608.001Upload MalwareSub-technique

Earth Lusca has staged malware and malicious files on compromised web servers, GitHub, and Google Drive.[1]

EnterpriseT1098.004SSH Authorized KeysSub-technique

Earth Lusca has dropped an SSH-authorized key in the `/root/.ssh` folder in order to access a compromised server with SSH.[1]

EnterpriseT1059.005Visual BasicSub-technique

Earth Lusca used VBA scripts.[1]

EnterpriseT1189Drive-by Compromise

Earth Lusca has performed watering hole attacks.[1]

EnterpriseT1018Remote System Discovery

Earth Lusca used the command powershell “Get-EventLog -LogName security -Newest 500 | where {$_.EventID -eq 4624} | format-list - property * | findstr “Address”” to find the network information of successfully logged-in accounts to discovery addresses of other machines. Earth Lusca has also used multiple scanning tools to discover other machines within the same compromised network.[1]

EnterpriseT1584.006Web ServicesSub-technique

Earth Lusca has compromised Google Drive repositories.[1]

EnterpriseT1059.007JavaScriptSub-technique

Earth Lusca has manipulated legitimate websites to inject malicious JavaScript code as part of their watering hole operations.[1]

EnterpriseT1036.005Match Legitimate Resource Name or LocationSub-technique

Earth Lusca used the command `move [file path] c:\windows\system32\spool\prtprocs\x64\spool.dll` to move and register a malicious DLL name as a Windows print processor, which eventually was loaded by the Print Spooler service.[1]

EnterpriseT1140Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information

Earth Lusca has used certutil to decode a string into a cabinet file.[1]

EnterpriseT1583.001DomainsSub-technique

Earth Lusca has registered domains, intended to look like legitimate target domains, that have been used in watering hole attacks.[1]

EnterpriseT1033System Owner/User Discovery

Earth Lusca collected information on user accounts via the whoami command.[1]

EnterpriseT1547.012Print ProcessorsSub-technique

Earth Lusca has added the Registry key `HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Print Processors\UDPrint” /v Driver /d “spool.dll /f` to load malware as a Print Processor.[1]

EnterpriseT1059.001PowerShellSub-technique

Earth Lusca has used PowerShell to execute commands.[1]

EnterpriseT1059.006PythonSub-technique

Earth Lusca used Python scripts for port scanning or building reverse shells.[1]

EnterpriseT1057Process Discovery

Earth Lusca has used Tasklist to obtain information from a compromised host.[1]

EnterpriseT1053.005Scheduled TaskSub-technique

Earth Lusca used the command schtasks /Create /SC ONLOgon /TN WindowsUpdateCheck /TR “[file path]” /ru system for persistence.[1]

EnterpriseT1574.001DLLSub-technique

Earth Lusca has placed a malicious payload in `%WINDIR%\SYSTEM32\oci.dll` so it would be sideloaded by the MSDTC service.[1]

EnterpriseT1112Modify Registry

Earth Lusca modified the registry using the command reg add “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment” /v UserInitMprLogonScript /t REG_SZ /d “[file path]” for persistence.[1]

EnterpriseT1047Windows Management Instrumentation

Earth Lusca used a VBA script to execute WMI.[1]

EnterpriseT1003.001LSASS MemorySub-technique

Earth Lusca has used ProcDump to obtain the hashes of credentials by dumping the memory of the LSASS process.[1]

EnterpriseT1218.005MshtaSub-technique

Earth Lusca has used `mshta.exe` to load an HTA script within a malicious .LNK file.[1]

EnterpriseT1482Domain Trust Discovery

Earth Lusca has used Nltest to obtain information about domain controllers.[1]

EnterpriseT1567.002Exfiltration to Cloud StorageSub-technique

Earth Lusca has used the megacmd tool to upload stolen files from a victim network to MEGA.[1]

EnterpriseT1548.002Bypass User Account ControlSub-technique

Earth Lusca has used the Fodhelper UAC bypass technique to gain elevated privileges.[1]

EnterpriseT1588.002ToolSub-technique

Earth Lusca has acquired and used a variety of open source tools.[1]

EnterpriseT1007System Service Discovery

Earth Lusca has used Tasklist to obtain information from a compromised host.[1]

EnterpriseT1204.002Malicious FileSub-technique

Earth Lusca required users to click on a malicious file for the loader to activate.[1]

EnterpriseT1190Exploit Public-Facing Application

Earth Lusca has compromised victims by directly exploiting vulnerabilities of public-facing servers, including those associated with Microsoft Exchange and Oracle GlassFish.[1]

EnterpriseT1090Proxy

Earth Lusca adopted Cloudflare as a proxy for compromised servers.[1]

EnterpriseT1027Obfuscated Files or Information

Earth Lusca used Base64 to encode strings.[1]

EnterpriseT1543.003Windows ServiceSub-technique

Earth Lusca created a service using the command sc create “SysUpdate” binpath= “cmd /c start “[file path]””&&sc config “SysUpdate” start= auto&&net start SysUpdate for persistence.[1]

EnterpriseT1566.002Spearphishing LinkSub-technique

Earth Lusca has sent spearphishing emails to potential targets that contained a malicious link.[1]

EnterpriseT1560.001Archive via UtilitySub-technique

Earth Lusca has used WinRAR to compress stolen files into an archive prior to exfiltration.[1]

EnterpriseT1583.004ServerSub-technique

Earth Lusca has acquired multiple servers for some of their operations, using each server for a different role.[1]

EnterpriseT1049System Network Connections Discovery

Earth Lusca employed a PowerShell script called RDPConnectionParser to read and filter the Windows event log “Microsoft-Windows-TerminalServices-RDPClient/Operational” (Event ID 1024) to obtain network information from RDP connections. Earth Lusca has also used netstat from a compromised system to obtain network connection information.[1]

EnterpriseT1595.002Vulnerability ScanningSub-technique

Earth Lusca has scanned for vulnerabilities in the public-facing servers of their targets.[1]

EnterpriseT1016System Network Configuration Discovery

Earth Lusca used the command ipconfig to obtain information about network configurations.[1]

EnterpriseT1588.001MalwareSub-technique

Earth Lusca has acquired and used a variety of malware, including Cobalt Strike.[1]

EnterpriseT1584.004ServerSub-technique

Earth Lusca has used compromised web servers as part of their operational infrastructure.[1]

EnterpriseT1204.001Malicious LinkSub-technique

Earth Lusca has sent spearphishing emails that required the user to click on a malicious link and subsequently open a decoy document with a malicious loader.[1]

EnterpriseT1210Exploitation of Remote Services

Earth Lusca has used Mimikatz to exploit a domain controller via the ZeroLogon exploit (CVE-2020-1472).[1]

EnterpriseT1003.006DCSyncSub-technique

Earth Lusca has used a DCSync command with Mimikatz to retrieve credentials from an exploited controller.[1]

Associated objects

Groups, software, and campaigns

ToolEnterprise

S0002: Mimikatz

Mimikatz is a credential dumper capable of obtaining plaintext Windows account logins and passwords, along with many other features that make it useful for testing the security of networks. [1] [2]

Windows
ToolEnterprise

S0194: PowerSploit

PowerSploit is an open source, offensive security framework comprised of PowerShell modules and scripts that perform a wide range of tasks related to penetration testing such as code execution, persistence, bypassing anti-virus, recon, and exfiltration. [1] [2] [3]

Windows
ToolEnterprise

S0057: Tasklist

The Tasklist utility displays a list of applications and services with their Process IDs (PID) for all tasks running on either a local or a remote computer. It is packaged with Windows operating systems and can be executed from the command-line interface. [1]

ToolEnterprise

S0160: certutil

certutil is a command-line utility that can be used to obtain certificate authority information and configure Certificate Services. [1]

Windows
MalwareEnterprise

S0154: Cobalt Strike

Cobalt Strike is a commercial, full-featured, remote access tool that bills itself as “adversary simulation software designed to execute targeted attacks and emulate the post-exploitation actions of advanced threat actors”. Cobalt Strike’s interactive post-exploit capabilities cover the full range of ATT&CK tactics, all executed within a single, integrated system.[1]

In addition to its own capabilities, Cobalt Strike leverages the capabilities of other well-known tools such as Metasploit and Mimikatz.[1]

LinuxmacOSWindows
ToolEnterprise

S0359: Nltest

Nltest is a Windows command-line utility used to list domain controllers and enumerate domain trusts.[1]

Windows
MalwareEnterprise

S0596: ShadowPad

ShadowPad is a modular backdoor that was first identified in a supply chain compromise of the NetSarang software in mid-July 2017. The malware was originally thought to be exclusively used by APT41, but has since been observed to be used by various Chinese threat activity groups. [1][2][3]

Windows
Relationship explorer

All related ATT&CK context

Change history

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.

ATT&CK release
19.2
Object version
2.1
Created
Modified
Raw hash
ddcf0d22795fa773...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
ReleaseBundle importedObject versionModifiedStatusRaw hash
19.22.1Current bundleddcf0d22795f…
19.12.1Older bundle7e211d515960…
Raw source

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.

Source references

External references and citations

MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.

  1. [1]
    TrendMicro EarthLusca 2022

    Chen, J., et al. (2022). Delving Deep: An Analysis of Earth Lusca’s Operations. Retrieved July 1, 2022.

    Open source URL
  2. [2]
    CHROMIUM

    (Citation: Microsoft Threat Actor Naming July 2023) (Citation: Recorded Future RedHotel August 2023)

  3. [3]
    Charcoal Typhoon

    (Citation: Microsoft Threat Actor Naming July 2023)

  4. [4]
    ControlX

    (Citation: Microsoft Threat Actor Naming July 2023)

  5. [5]
    Microsoft Threat Actor Naming July 2023

    Microsoft . (2023, July 12). How Microsoft names threat actors. Retrieved November 17, 2023.

    Open source URL
  6. [6]
    Recorded Future RedHotel August 2023

    Insikt Group. (2023, August 8). RedHotel: A Prolific, Chinese State-Sponsored Group Operating at a Global Scale. Retrieved March 11, 2024.

    Open source URL
  7. [7]
    Recorded Future TAG-22 July 2021

    INSIKT GROUP. (2021, July 8). Chinese State-Sponsored Activity Group TAG-22 Targets Nepal, the Philippines, and Taiwan Using Winnti and Other Tooling. Retrieved September 16, 2024.

    Open source URL
  8. [8]
    TAG-22

    (Citation: Recorded Future TAG-22 July 2021)

  9. [9]
    mitre-attackG1006
    Open source URL
Source and licensing

Source: MITRE ATT&CK®. © 2026 The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Glexia is not affiliated with or endorsed by MITRE.