Transparent Tribe, a threat group aligned with Pakistan and tracked under names including APT36 and Earth Karkaddan, has been linked to a new wave of cyber attacks aimed at government and defense organizations in India and Afghanistan. According to Zscaler ThreatLabz, the campaign relies on a previously unseen backdoor written in Rust.
The backdoor stands out for its use of private GitHub repositories as command-and-control infrastructure, a technique that lets the attackers blend their traffic with normal GitHub use. The targeting of state and military entities in India and Afghanistan is consistent with Transparent Tribe's historical focus on South Asian government and defense sectors.
Because only one source was available, the report's findings could not be independently compared. The attribution to Transparent Tribe and the technical details of the Rust backdoor rest solely on Zscaler ThreatLabz's analysis as reported by The Hacker News.