The risk actor referred to 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 by way of malicious LNK information disguised as convention invites despatched to targets concerned with studying extra about unmanned car programs,” Arctic Wolf Labs mentioned in a technical report revealed this week.
The exercise, which additionally singled out an unnamed producer of precision-guided missile programs, seems to be geopolitically motivated because the timing coincides amid deepening protection cooperation between Pakistan and Türkiye, and the current India-Pakistan army skirmishes.
Patchwork, additionally referred to 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 at the very least 2009, the hacking group has a observe file of placing entities in China, Pakistan, and different nations in South Asia.
Precisely a yr in the past, the Knownsec 404 Group 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 referred to as PGoShell.
For the reason that 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 referred to as Protego to reap a variety of data from compromised Home windows programs.
One other report revealed by Chinese language cybersecurity agency QiAnXin again in Might mentioned it recognized infrastructure overlaps between Patchwork and DoNot Group (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 growth of its concentrating on footprint, utilizing malicious Home windows shortcut (LNK) information distributed by way of 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 further payloads from an exterior server (“expouav[.]org”), a site created on June 25, 2025, that hosts a PDF lure mimicking a global convention on unmanned car programs, 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 mentioned. “This concentrating on happens as Türkiye instructions 65% of the worldwide UAV export market and develops vital 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 via a scheduled process, in the end resulting in the execution of shellcode that carries out intensive 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 buildings,” the corporate mentioned. “Dropping Elephant demonstrates continued operational funding and growth via architectural diversification from x64 DLL to x86 PE codecs, and enhanced C2 protocol implementation via impersonation of reliable web sites.”
