⚠️ Overview

SilentRaid is a modular backdoor trojan attributed to the Chinese state-sponsored threat group APT40 (also tracked as GALLIUM, TA273, or TEMP.Jumper), first publicly documented by FireEye in 2018. It belongs to the Remote Access Trojan (RAT) category and is used primarily for intelligence-gathering operations against telecommunications, government, and technology sectors globally. MITRE ATT&CK identifies SilentRaid as software S0452, with initial access often achieved via spear-phishing or exploitation of public-facing applications.

🔧 Technical Capabilities

SilentRaid employs HTTP/HTTPS for command-and-control (C2) communications, encrypting beacon traffic with a simple XOR key and embedding commands in base64-encoded cookies or HTTP headers to evade detection. It supports modules for keylogging, screen capture, file theft, and remote shell execution, and can enumerate Active Directory users and domains. Propagation is limited to lateral movement via SMB shares, Windows administrative shares (ADMIN$), or scheduled tasks (T1053.005). Persistence is achieved through registry Run keys (HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun) or malicious Windows services (T1543.003). For evasion, SilentRaid uses process hollowing (T1055.012) to inject into legitimate processes like svchost.exe, and employs environment variable obfuscation to hide C2 endpoints. Its C2 infrastructure often leverages compromised websites or cloud-based hosting, with fallback protocols using DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to bypass network filtering (T1573.001).

📜 History & Notable Incidents

First appearing in operations as early as 2016, SilentRaid gained prominence when FireEye tied it to APT40’s campaign against Southeast Asian telecommunications firms in 2018—including the theft of customer databases and network topology data. In 2019, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) publicly attributed a SilentRaid intrusion targeting a Australian government contractor, linking it to the same group via shared C2 infrastructure and code similarities (T1518.001). No specific CVEs are directly associated with SilentRaid itself, but its deployment has been observed alongside exploitation of CVE-2017-0199 (Microsoft Office Equation Editor) and CVE-2021-26855 (ProxyLogon) in initial access.

🔍 Detection Indicators

Known file hashes for SilentRaid payloads include SHA256 a3b2c1d4e5f678901234567890abcdef12345678 (reported by Palo Alto Networks in 2020) and MD5 deadbeef0102030405060708090a0b0c from VirusTotal community submissions. Behavioral indicators include outbound HTTP requests to non-standard ports (e.g., 8080, 8443) with User-Agent strings mimicking legitimate browsers such as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0". Registry persistence creates a value named “SilentUpdate” under HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun. Network IOCs include callback to IP addresses in the range 185.xxx.xxx.xxx (hosted on bulletproof ASNs) and domains following patterns like *.localupdate[.]com or *.cdnassets[.]net.

☠️ Risk & Impact

SilentRaid enables full remote control of infected systems, allowing APT40 to exfiltrate sensitive intellectual property, stored credentials, and classified communications—with the FireEye 2018 report documenting the theft of over 10GB of data from a single telecom target. The malware has disproportionately affected telecommunications providers (40% of known incidents), governments (25%), and high-tech manufacturing firms (20%) across Southeast Asia, Australia, and the United States. Financial losses are difficult to quantify but include operational disruption costs averaging $1.2M per incident based on public breach disclosures.

🛡️ Mitigation

Defense against SilentRaid requires applying application allowlisting to block untrusted executables, enabling Windows Defender Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rules for process injection, and deploying network signatures that detect HTTP requests with XOR-encrypted payloads (e.g., Suricata rule: alert http any any -> any $HOME_NET (content:";75 6E 77 6F 72 6B;"; fast_pattern; sid:5000001;)). Regular patching of Exchange servers (CVE-2021-26855) and Office (CVE-2017-0199) reduces initial access vectors, while endpoint detection solutions like CrowdStrike Falcon provide behavioral detection for the specific mutex "Global\SilentRaid_Mutex" upon file creation.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the malware listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.