ESET Research discovers new China-aligned group, GopherWhisper: It abuses messaging services Discord, Slack, and Outlook to spy

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, April 23, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ESET researchers have discovered a previously undocumented China-aligned APT group that they named GopherWhisper. The group wields a wide array of tools, mostly written in Go, that use injectors and loaders to deploy and execute various backdoors in its arsenal. In the observed campaign, the threat actors targeted a governmental institution in Mongolia. GopherWhisper abuses legitimate services, notably Discord, Slack, Microsoft 365 Outlook, and file.io, for command and control (C&C) communication and exfiltration.