China's Salt Typhoon backdoors Latin American orgs with new snooping malware
These hacks, however, weren’t discovered until late 2023. REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); In August 2025, ESET’s malware hunters found the group’s new backdoor, called SparroWocky, deployed against government agencies in Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. While targeting entities in these countries “represents a rare occurrence among the China-aligned APT groups,” ESET believes the focus likely reflects China’s reaction to recent US President Donald Trump’s initiatives in the region, malware researchers Alexandre Côté Cyr and Romain Dumont said.
- ▪These hacks, however, weren’t discovered until late 2023.
- ▪REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); In August 2025, ESET’s malware hunters found the group’s new backdoor, called SparroWocky, deployed against government agencies in Argentina,
- ▪While targeting entities in these countries “represents a rare occurrence among the China-aligned APT groups,” ESET believes the focus likely reflects China’s reaction to recent US President Donald Trump’s initiatives in the region, malware
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/17/chinas-salt-typhoon-backdoors-latin-american-orgs-with-new-snooping-malware/5297286 |
| Publication time | Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:00:17 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-17T20:08:44.286Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-17T20:08:44.286Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | mmBbAuyoj2G3 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); security China's Salt Typhoon backdoors Latin American orgs with new snooping malware Beware the SparroWocky, my son! The backdoor that bites… Jessica Lyons Jessica Lyons Cybersecurity Editor Published thu 17 Sep 2026 // 19:00 UTC READ MORE No content China’s Salt Typhoon gang has developed a new backdoor and dropped it in networks belonging to high-profile organizations in several countries across Central and South America since at least August 2025, according to researchers.The…
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