Cisco Talos Uncovers Lotus Blossom’s Multi-Campaign Cyber Espionage Operations

Cisco Talos has uncovered a series of cyber espionage campaigns attributed to the advanced persistent threat (APT) group Lotus Blossom, also known as Spring Dragon, Billbug, and Thrip. 

The group has been active since at least 2012, targeting government, manufacturing, telecommunications, and media sectors in regions such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Talos identified Sagerunex, a backdoor tool used exclusively by Lotus Blossom, as the core malware in these campaigns. 

The investigation revealed multiple variants of Sagerunex, evolving from its original form to leverage third-party cloud services such as Dropbox, Twitter, and Zimbra webmail as command-and-control (C2) tunnels, instead of traditional Virtual Private Servers (VPS). This shift helps the group evade detection while maintaining control over infected endpoints. 

The group has been observed gaining persistence on compromised systems by embedding Sagerunex into the system registry and configuring it to run as a service. The malware operates as a dynamic link library (DLL), executed directly in memory to avoid detection. The campaigns also showcase long-term persistence strategies, allowing attackers to remain undetected for months. 

Beyond Sagerunex, Lotus Blossom employs an arsenal of hacking tools to facilitate credential theft, privilege escalation, and data exfi

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