Threat actor

Transparent Tribe

0 mentions in 7 days · 0 in 30 days · 2 total · first seen Aug 15, 2026 · last Aug 16, 2026

Timeline2 articles

APT36 Suspected in PATCHCORD Espionage Campaign Using Google Sheets C2

Acronis links the PATCHCORD espionage campaign targeting Afghan telecom and South Asian critical infrastructure to APT36 with moderate confidence.

Acronis Threat Research Unit documented PATCHCORD, a previously undocumented C/C++ backdoor delivered via fake VPN installers impersonating Afghan Telecom (AFTEL), which hijacks Edge, Chrome and Firefox shortcuts for persistence and executes in-memory shellcode. A related Go implant, SHEETCORD, abuses the Google Sheets API for per-victim C2 and was distributed via a domain impersonating India's National Informatics Centre, while a third tool, HACKERAI C2 Agent, uses GitHub Gists and shows signs of LLM-assisted coding. An exposed staging server revealed SuperShell, RAT frameworks, credential-harvesting tools and OpenSSH exploit code, and the researchers attribute the activity to APT36/Transparent Tribe at moderate confidence.

Security AffairsAug 16, 07:24 UTC · Aug 16, 2026Threat actor in the wild

New PATCHCORD Backdoor Targets Afghan Telecom and Indian Critical Infrastructure

Acronis links APT36 (Transparent Tribe) to new backdoors PATCHCORD and SHEETCORD targeting Afghan Telecom and Indian government, defense, and energy networks.

Acronis TRU described an ongoing Pakistan-aligned campaign attributed with moderate confidence to APT36, delivering a previously undocumented C/C++ backdoor named PATCHCORD via fake VPN installers impersonating Afghan Telecom (AFTEL) and telecom management tools. PATCHCORD persists by hijacking browser shortcuts for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, registers with a single C2 server, and executes shellcode and arbitrary cmd.exe commands. Infrastructure analysis revealed SHEETCORD, a Go backdoor combining SHEETCREEP and PATCHCORD features that uses Google Sheets for C2 and a PowerShell-based remote execution, delivered via a fake site mimicking India's National Informatics Center. APT36 has used PATCHCORD since at least March 2026, including a variant with anti-analysis features used against India's energy sector, and the toolkit includes antnium, GateSentinel, SuperShell, and exploits for CVE-2024-6387.

The Hacker NewsAug 15, 00:00 UTC · Aug 15, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2024-6387

Related CVEsby mentions

CVE-2024-63878.1100%
A security regression (CVE-2006-5051) was discovered in OpenSSH's server (sshd).
A security regression (CVE-2006-5051) was discovered in OpenSSH's server (sshd). There is a race condition which can lead sshd to handle some signals in an unsafe manner. An unauthenticated, remote attacker may be able to trigger it by failing to authenticate within a set time period.
· sonicwall sma 6200 firmware · sonicwall sma 7200 firmware PoC ×7—

Appears with

vendor Afghan Telecom 2 malware PATCHCORD 2 malware SHEETCORD 2 vendor Acronis 2 threat actor APT36 2 product SHEETCORD 1 product SHEETCREEP 1 product SuperShell 1 vendor Google 1 vendor National Informatics Centre 1 victim Afghan Telecom 1 victim National Informatics Center 1 malware HACKERAI C2 Agent 1 malware SHEETCREEP 1 organization National Informatics Center 1 product PATCHCORD 1

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