Follow the Smoke | China-nexus Threat Actors Hammer At the Doors of Top Tier Targets
This report uncovers a set of related threat clusters linked to PurpleHaze and ShadowPad operators targeting organizations, including cybersecurity vendors. In October 2024, SentinelLABS observed and countered a reconnaissance operation targeting SentinelOne, which we track as part of a broader activity cluster named PurpleHaze. At the beginning of 2025, we also identified and helped disrupt an intrusion linked to a wider ShadowPad operation. The affected organization was responsible for managing hardware logistics for SentinelOne employees at the time. A thorough investigation of SentinelOne’s infrastructure, software, and hardware assets confirmed that the attackers were unsuccessful and SentinelOne was not compromised by any of these activities. The PurpleHaze and ShadowPad activity clusters span multiple partially related intrusions into different targets occurring between July 2024 and March 2025. The victimology includes a South Asian government entity, a European media organization, and more than 70 organizations across a wide range of sectors. We attribute the PurpleHaze and ShadowPad activity clusters with high confidence to China-nexus threat actors. We loosely associate some PurpleHaze intrusions with actors that overlap with the suspected Chinese cyberespionage groups publicly reported as APT15 and UNC5174. This research underscores the persistent threat Chinese cyberespionage actors pose to global industries and public sector organizations, while also highlighting a rarely discussed target they pursue: cybersecurity vendors.
