MALWARE FAMILY

RoyalCli

Internal ID: win.royalcli

aliases

Last seen:Mar 17, 2026

Intelligence Profile

RoyalCli is a backdoor which appears to be an evolution of BS2005 and uses familiar encryption and encoding routines. The name RoyalCli was chosen by us due to a debugging path left in the binary. RoyalCli and BS2005 both communicate with the attacker's command and control (C2) through Internet Explorer (IE) by using the COM interface IWebBrowser2.

Threat Analysis

RoyalCli is a malware family tracked by threat intelligence researchers and catalogued in the Malpedia dataset. It represents a distinct malicious software lineage with identifiable code characteristics, behaviors, and victimology.

External References

→https://github.com/nccgroup/Royal_APT

→https://research.nccgroup.com/2018/03/10/apt15-is-alive-and-strong-an-analysis-of-royalcli-and-royaldns/

→https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2018/march/apt15-is-alive-and-strong-an-analysis-of-royalcli-and-royaldns/

→https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-profiles/bronze-palace

Quick Facts

TypeMalware Family

Aliases1

Also Known As

win.royalcli

Research Links

MITRE ATT&CK VirusTotal Google (news) Twitter/X search

Data sourced from Malpedia, Ransomware.live, RansomLook, and CTIWATCH OSINT collection. Actor attribution is based on available intelligence and may be incomplete.

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