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Microsoft Publishes Silk Typhoon Threat Intelligence Article - 20250306001

Overview

Microsoft have published a threat intelligence article reporting Silk Typhoon, a Chinese espionage group, now targeting common IT solutions like remote management tools and cloud applications to gain initial access. After successfully compromising a victim, Silk Typhoon uses the stolen keys and credentials to infiltrate customer networks where they can then abuse a variety of deployed applications, including Microsoft services and others, to achieve their espionage objectives.

What has been observed?

Silk Typhoon is an espionage-focused Chinese state actor whose activities indicate that they are a well-resourced and technically efficient group with the ability to quickly operationalize exploits for discovered zero-day vulnerabilities in edge devices. This threat actor holds one of the largest targeting footprints among Chinese threat actors. Part of this is due to their opportunistic nature of acting on discoveries from vulnerability scanning operations, moving quickly to the exploitation phase once they discover a vulnerable public-facing device that they could exploit.

As a result, Silk Typhoon has been observed targeting a wide range of sectors and geographic regions, including but not limited to information technology (IT) services and infrastructure, remote monitoring and management (RMM) companies, managed service providers (MSPs) and affiliates, healthcare, legal services, higher education, defence, government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), energy, and others located in the United States and throughout the world.

Recommendation

The WA SOC recommends administrators perform the following:

  • Microsoft Threat Intelligence article: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/03/05/silk-typhoon-targeting-it-supply-chain/
  • Review 'Silk Typhoon TTPs' and 'Historical Silk Typhoon zero-day exploitation' sections for known tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPS),
  • Review 'Hunting guidances' and 'Indicators of compromise' sections to perform discovery of behaviour potentially associated with Silk Typhoon,
  • Review the 'Recommendations' and 'Threat intelligence reports' sections for further relevant information.