Earth Ammit Targets Taiwan's Drone and Satellite Supply Chains

Cybersecurity researchers at Trend Micro documented a sustained espionage operation by a threat actor they named Earth Ammit, which ran two related campaigns, VENOM and TIDRONE, between 2023 and 2024 against Taiwan's drone and satellite supply chains. The findings were disclosed publicly in May 2025. Rather than attacking high-value military and technology targets head-on, the group concentrated on the upstream segment of the supply chain, compromising trusted vendors and service providers to reach downstream customers.

According to Trend Micro, the first wave, VENOM, targeted a broad range of upstream suppliers across the heavy industry, media, technology, software services, and healthcare sectors, relying largely on open-source and publicly available tools to keep costs low and complicate tracking. The Hacker News reported that the attackers exploited enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to gain initial access, then deployed web shells and remote access tools for persistence.

The second wave, TIDRONE, observed in 2024, struck more directly at military and satellite organizations in Taiwan, leveraging compromised service providers to deploy custom backdoors known as CXCLNT and CLNTEND for cyberespionage. The Record reported that the operations also extended to targets in South Korea, spanning drone and UAV suppliers alongside other strategic sectors.

Trend Micro assesses Earth Ammit as connected to Chinese-speaking nation-state actors, basing the judgment on shared command-and-control infrastructure and overlapping targeting patterns across both campaigns. This is an analytic assessment by private researchers, not an official government attribution, and the group's definitive affiliation remains unconfirmed. The operation fits a broader pattern of suspected China-linked espionage against Taiwan's defense and high-technology base, notable here for the deliberate use of supply-chain compromise to amplify reach into otherwise hardened drone, satellite, and military targets.