China's Salt Typhoon spotted probing Latin American government with newly developed SparroWocky backdoor

Date:
Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:35:00 +0000

Description:
The group has been focused on Latin America for almost a year now.

FULL STORY
Salt Typhoon has been reassigned to Latin America, and its apparently all due to Donald Trumps renewed interest in the continent.

Cybersecurity researchers ESET have been tracking Salt Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor for years. This is the same group that was seen hacking telecommunication giants and government agencies across the western world since at least 2019. According to the researchers, from mid-2025 and well into 2026, the group has been targeting a number of Latin American countries: Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Peru, Puerto
Rico, and Venezuela. They were seen deploying brand new malware, a backdoor called SparroWocky, that features around 30 commands such as system
profiling, file exfiltration, screenshot grabbing, and more. ESET says that around 90% of all Salt Typhoons recent activity was devoted to this specific region.

The discovery of China-built malware in these countries comes as somewhat of
a surprise. Latin America cannot be considered an open ally to the Chinese, but they are quite influential in the region, both economically, and diplomatically. ESET sees the development as a rare occurrence, and stresses that this is most likely a response to Trumps initiatives in the region.

Donald Trumps second presidential term has brought about an aggressive reaffirmation of US interests in Latin America, which threatens various long-term investments that China has cultivated throughout the continent in the last decade, in domains such as energy, mining, and telecommunications, ESET says. We suspect that FamousSparrows (their name for Salt Typhoon) activities are intended to help China better monitor and anticipate the reaction of local governments to current US pressures.

ESET says the backdoor is being delivered via a trident loader scheme that consists of a legitimate executable, a malicious DLL, and a file containing the encrypted malware. By side-loading the DLL, the crooks can deploy the malware without being spotted.

Via The Register

Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/chinas-salt-typhoon-spotted-probing-lat in-american-government-with-newly-developed-sparrowocky-backdoor

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