LAST UPDATED: 2025-07-07
DEFAULT SEVERITY LEVEL: CRITICAL
The Special Report run on 2025-07-07 contained information about IoT devices that are believed to have been infected with Raptor Train malware during the period 2024-06-05 to 2024-09-13 and 2025-06-24 to 2025-07-01. The data is provided as a result of the botnet disruption operation publicly announced by US Law Enforcement and international partners on 2024-09-18.
More information about Raptor Train can be found in the following advisories:
- US Department of Justice “Court-Authorized Operation Disrupts Worldwide Botnet Used by People’s Republic of China State-Sponsored Hackers“
- US Federal Bureau of Investigation “FBI Director Announces Chinese Botnet Disruption, Exposes Flax Typhoon Hacker Group’s True Identity at Aspen Cyber Summit“
- US National Security Agency “NSA and Allies Issue Advisory about PRC-Linked Actors and Botnet Operations“
- UK National Cyber Security Centre “NCSC and partners issue advice to counter China-linked campaign targeting thousands of devices“
- Australian Signals Directorate “People’s Republic of China-Linked Actors Compromise Routers and IoT Devices for Botnet Operations“
Technical information and Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) can be found in:
- AU/CA/NZ/UK/US Joint Cybersecurity Advisory “People’s Republic of China-Linked Actors Compromise Routers and IoT Devices for Botnet Operations“
- Lumen Black Lotus Lab’s “Derailing the Raptor Train“
Note: Additional events were also included in the one-off Special Report for the period from 2025-06-24 to 2025-07-01, to cover the period from when Shadowserver’s live sinkholing of remaining C2 domain traffic began but before events were automatically included in our standard free daily Sinkhole Events Report. Those later events feature less detail in some fields than the main historical events, since they are based on the content of our standard Sinkhole Events Report.
Shadowserver Special Reports are unlike all of our other standard free daily network reports. They do not cover a specific daily 24-hour time period.
Instead, we send out Special Reports in situations where we are able to share one-time, high value datasets that we feel should be reported responsibly for maximum public benefit. Sometimes there are incidents when it would be useful to be able to notify potential victims about events or breaches that may have impacted them outside of the previous 24-hour period, when it may take a number of days for incident responders to conduct forensic investigations and analyzed data becomes available for sharing with potential victims. Although the events included in these Special Reports will fall outside of our usual 24-hour daily reporting window, we believe that there would still be significant benefit to our constituents in receiving and, hopefully, acting on the retrospective data.
If you have missed a Special Report because you were NOT yet a subscriber at the time a report was pushed out, simply subscribe for your network now and specifically request all recent Shadowserver Special Reports – and we will regenerate them specifically for your network, at no cost.
Please note that the data shared across special reports may differ on a case by case basis, hence the report formats for individual Special Reports may be different.
The data in this Raptor Train Historical Bot Infections Special Report was provided to Shadowserver by US Law Enforcement partners to disseminate to National CERTs/CSIRTs and network owners globally, to maximize remediation efforts.
Exact timestamps were not available for individual events, so the timestamp field is set to “2025-07-07 00:00:00”. Since only the first and last seen time for an infection was recorded, the first and last seen dates for an infected victim system represent a date range when an infection was likely active. However, there could have been multiple infections during that time period for shorter individual time periods (and therefore periods without an active infection).
This special report has severity level CRITICAL set on all events. Severity levels are described here.
Filename prefix: 2025-07-07-special.
Note: this is accessible in the API using 2025-07-07 as the search date.