Triad Nexus Evades Sanctions to Fuel Cybercrime

Summary

Triad Nexus, a major cybercrime operation linked to Asian organized crime, has circumvented US sanctions imposed on the Funnell CDN by leveraging infrastructure laundering, front companies, and abuse of Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft cloud services. Since 2020, the group has orchestrated over $200 million in losses through cryptocurrency investment fraud ('pig butchering' scams), brand impersonation, and phishing targeting major retailers and financial institutions. After sanctions, Triad Nexus has pivoted toward emerging markets (Spanish, Vietnamese, Indonesian) while maintaining a persistent threat to Western assets.

Full text

Triad Nexus, an illicit network acting as the backbone of scams, money laundering, and illicit gambling operations, is using various techniques and front companies to avoid sanctions, Silent Push reports. Operating since at least 2020, the cybercrime operation has been responsible for more than $200 million in losses, mainly caused by sophisticated cryptocurrency investment fraud (CIF) scams referred to as ‘pig butchering’. Linked to Asian organized crime, the group has historically relied on the Funnull content delivery network (CDN) to facilitate various types of fraud. After the US sanctioned Funnull last year, Triad Nexus attempted to distance itself from the Philippines-based company through infrastructure laundering, the use of front companies, and geo-fencing. “Despite federal sanctions in 2025, the group has reinstated its global fraud engine, shifting its focus toward emerging markets while maintaining a persistent threat to Western enterprise assets,” Silent Push notes in a fresh report. Triad Nexus’ activities were detailed in 2024, when Silent Push analyzed 200,000 unique hostnames that were being proxied through Funnull. It also linked the group to the Polyfill attack and to retail phishing scams targeting major brands.Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading. Now, the cyber defense company draws attention to Triad Nexus’ abuse of Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft cloud services as part of its infrastructure laundering operation that relies on account mules for the illicit acquisition of accounts. “This provides its scams with the ‘appearance of legitimacy’, high speed, and professional performance that even tech-savvy Western audiences can’t resist,” Silent Push notes. Simultaneously, the group continues to rely on AS152194 (CTG Server Limited) as the bulletproof backbone of its operation. In addition to engaging in virtual currency investment scams, Triad Nexus has specialized in brand impersonation, creating pixel-perfect clones of websites of numerous organizations, including Cartier, Chanel, Coach, eBay, Kering, Macyʼs, Rakuten, Tiffany, TripAdvisor, and Vietnam Post. It also targeted financial entities such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Etsy, iTrustCapital, MoneyGram, Royal Bank of Canada, Wells Fargo, and Western Union. To evade post-sanctions monitoring, the group implemented a US block, preventing visitors from accessing the illicit domains from US IP addresses. “As the network continues to withdraw from direct U.S. exposure to avoid detection, it has been pivotally expanding into the Spanish, Vietnamese, and Indonesian markets. Using localized templates to target these regions, its goal is to ensure its illicit profits continue to flow,” Silent Push explains. To distance itself from the Funnull brand, Triad Nexus has been using ‘clean’ front companies since before the US sanctions. These include Bole CDN, CDN1[.]ai, Yunray[.]ai, CDN5[.]com, and CTGCDN. Additionally, the group started routing traffic to more than 175 randomly generated CNAME domains, setting up each of them differently to segment the client infrastructure and mapping them to multiple enterprise services. 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Indicators of Compromise

• domain — CDN1.ai
• domain — Yunray.ai
• domain — CDN5.com
• malware — Triad Nexus

Entities