{"id":223986,"date":"2025-10-25T04:15:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T09:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/apt36-targets-indian-government-with-golang-based-deskrat-malware-campaign"},"modified":"2025-10-25T04:15:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T09:15:09","slug":"apt36-targets-indian-government-with-golang-based-deskrat-malware-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/apt36-targets-indian-government-with-golang-based-deskrat-malware-campaign","title":{"rendered":"APT36 Targets Indian Government with Golang-Based DeskRAT Malware Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/apt36-targets-indian-government-with-golang-based-deskrat-malware-campaign2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as <strong>DeskRAT<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The activity, <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.sekoia.io\/transparenttribe-targets-indian-military-organisations-with-deskrat\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">observed<\/a> in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.seqrite.com\/blog\/umbrella-of-pakistani-threats-converging-tactics-of-cyber-operations-targeting-india\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Transparent Tribe<\/a> (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. It also builds upon a prior campaign <a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2025\/08\/transparent-tribe-targets-indian-govt.html\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">disclosed<\/a> by CYFIRMA in August 2025.<\/p>\n<p>The attack chains involve sending phishing emails containing a ZIP file attachment, or in some cases, a link pointing to an archive hosted on legitimate cloud services like Google Drive. Present within the ZIP file is a malicious Desktop file embedding commands to display a decoy PDF (\u201cCDS_Directive_Armed_Forces.pdf\u201d) using Mozilla Firefox while simultaneously executing the main payload.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as DeskRAT. The activity, observed in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,1490],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}