Mapping the Adversary: Inside the Chinese Pentesting Ecosystem

China has quietly built a parallel offensive ecosystem designed to bypass your defenses.

While many security teams continue to defend against familiar toolchains and signatures, China-based threat actors have adopted a fundamentally different model: a closed, state-aligned pentesting ecosystem built on “indigenous and controllable” capabilities.

Accelerated by China’s 2021 Regulations on the Management of Security Vulnerabilities (RMSV), this ecosystem redirects independent vulnerability research into government-controlled pipelines—fueling a mature offensive stack that rarely appears in Western tooling, documentation, or detection logic.

The result: an adversary that operates with different discovery methods, exploit frameworks, and infrastructure, often creating blind spots within traditional security programs.

In this session, we dismantle the architecture of China’s domestic cybersecurity ecosystem and examine the tools and workflows actively powering modern campaigns.

You will learn:

• Reconnaissance Beyond Shodan: How threat actors use specialized Chinese “cyberspace search engines” to map global assets and fingerprint infrastructure using signatures absent from Western platforms.
• The “Indigenous” Exploit Chain: A technical breakdown of automated frameworks that identify exposed enterprise services and attempt exploitation immediately upon discovery.
• Detecting the Evasive: Practical strategies for identifying post-exploitation activity, including the use of Behinder (Ice Scorpion)—a widely adopted web shell management tool that encrypts command-and-control traffic to evade conventional inspection and analytics.