Three China-Nexus Espionage Campaigns Linked Through Sparrow Malware Ecosystem

Three distinct threat activity clusters with shared infrastructure and malware code similarities have been observed targeting telecommunications providers, government organizations, military entities, research institutions, and critical infrastructure across Latin America, Asia, and Europe over the past year. Check Point Research is tracking the clusters under the names SilentDelivery, OceanGate, and DarkWire. Although initially assumed to be independent sets of attacks, each with its own backdoors and post-exploitation tooling, they have all been linked through a malware ecosystem called Sparrow. The entity behind the Sparrow framework has been codenamed CopperDragon, and is assessed to be a digital quartermaster developing tools for…