- ESET reports Salt Typhoon shifted focus to Latin America, hitting Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and others
- Group deployed newSparroWockybackdoor with 30+ commands for profiling, exfiltration, and surveillance
- Researchers link pivot to Trump’s renewed US push in the region, threatening China’s long‑term investments
Salt Typhoon has been reassigned to Latin America, and it’s apparently all due to Donald Trump’s 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 Typhoon’s recent activity was devoted to this specific region.
A rare occurrence
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 Trump’s initiatives in the region.
“Donald Trump’s 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 FamousSparrow’s (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 deliveredable, a malicious DLL, and a file containing the encrypted malware. By side-loading the DLL, the crooks can deploy the malware without being spotted
