Threat Intelligence Directory

APTIran has claimed responsibility for a large-scale campaign targeting Israeli critical infrastructure, asserting infiltration of government ministries, hospitals, universities, and financial institutions as retaliation for Israeli military operations. The group has leaked over 350,000 Israeli government login credentials and approximately 300 internal databases, while also threatening to create a 'zombie' network from infected devices. They have reportedly deployed ransomware strains such as ALPHV and LockBit as part of their offensive toolkit. Additionally, APTIran has made unverified claims of compromising Israeli water control systems and the state-owned food security agency Jordan Silos and Supply General Co.

313 Team is an Iraq-based threat actor that has conducted coordinated DDoS campaigns targeting multiple government servers in the UAE, Kuwait, and Romania, often in response to political statements. They have claimed responsibility for significant disruptions, including a one-hour shutdown of Romania’s National Tax Agency and an 18-hour outage of Kuwait's national e-government portal. The group has also engaged in website defacements, showcasing coordinated branding with other aligned groups. Their operations reflect a focus on government infrastructure, employing DDoS techniques and leveraging public political discourse as justification for their attacks.

Rare is the APT group that goes largely undetected for nine years, but XDSpy is just that; a previously undocumented espionage group that has been active since 2011. It has attracted very little public attention, with the exception of an advisory from the Belarusian CERT in February 2020. In the interim, the group has compromised many government agencies and private companies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

[Taidoor](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0015) has been deprecated, as the only technique it was linked to was deprecated in ATT&CK v7.

While analysing an incident which involved a suspected keylogger, we identified a malicious library able to interact with a virtual file system, which is usually the sign of an advanced APT actor. This turned out to be a malicious loader internally named ‘Slingshot’, part of a new, and highly sophisticated attack platform that rivals Project Sauron and Regin in complexity. While for most victims the infection vector for Slingshot remains unknown, we were able to find several cases where the attackers got access to MikroTik routers and placed a component downloaded by Winbox Loader, a management suite for MikroTik routers. In turn, this infected the administrator of the router. We believe this cluster of activity started in at least 2012 and was still active at the time of this analysis (February 2018).

[RTM](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0048) is a cybercriminal group that has been active since at least 2015 and is primarily interested in users of remote banking systems in Russia and neighboring countries. The group uses a Trojan by the same name ([RTM](https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0148)). (Citation: ESET RTM Feb 2017)

Recorded Future’s Insikt Group has identified two new cyberespionage campaigns targeting the Tibetan Community over the past two years. The campaigns, which we are collectively naming RedAlpha, combine light reconnaissance, selective targeting, and diverse malicious tooling. We discovered this activity as the result of pivoting off of a new malware sample observed targeting the Tibetan community based in India.

Malware developers have started to use the zero-day exploit for Task Scheduler component in Windows, two days after proof-of-concept code for the vulnerability appeared online. A security researcher who uses the online name SandboxEscaper on August 27 released the source code for exploiting a security bug in the Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) interface used by Windows Task Scheduler. More specifically, the problem is with the SchRpcSetSecurity API function, which fails to properly check user's permissions, allowing write privileges on files in C:\Windows\Task. The vulnerability affects Windows versions 7 through 10 and can be used by an attacker to escalate their privileges to all-access SYSTEM account level. A couple of days after the exploit code became available (source and binary), malware researchers at ESET noticed its use in active malicious campaigns from a threat actor they call PowerPool, because of their tendency to use tools mostly written in PowerShell for lateral movement. The group appears to have a small number of victims in the following countries: Chile, Germany, India, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Ukraine. The researchers say that PowerPool developers did not use the binary version of the exploit, deciding instead to make some subtle changes to the source code before recompiling it.

These attackers were the subject of an extensive report by Symantec in 2011, which termed the attackers Nitro and stated: 'The goal of the attackers appears to be to collect intellectual property such as design documents, formulas, and manufacturing processes. In addition, the same attackers appear to have a lengthy operation history including attacks on other industries and organizations. Attacks on the chemical industry are merely their latest attack wave. As part of our investigations, we were also able to identify and contact one of the attackers to try and gain insights into the motivations behind these attacks.' Palo Alto Networks reported on continued activity by the attackers in 2014.

[Naikon](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0019) is assessed to be a state-sponsored cyber espionage group attributed to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Chengdu Military Region Second Technical Reconnaissance Bureau (Military Unit Cover Designator 78020).(Citation: CameraShy) Active since at least 2010, [Naikon](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0019) has primarily conducted operations against government, military, and civil organizations in Southeast Asia, as well as against international bodies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).(Citation: CameraShy)(Citation: Baumgartner Naikon 2015) While [Naikon](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0019) shares some characteristics with [APT30](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0013), the two groups do not appear to be exact matches.(Citation: Baumgartner Golovkin Naikon 2015)

Adversary group targeting diplomatic missions, governmental and military organisations, mainly in Ukraine.

Infy is a group of suspected Iranian origin. Since early 2013, we have observed activity from a unique threat actor group, which we began to investigate based on increased activities against human right activists in the beginning of 2015. In line5with other research on the campaign, released prior to publication of this document, we have adopted the name “Infy”, which is based on labels used in the infrastructure and its two families of malware agents. Thanks to information we have been able to collect during the course of our research, such as characteristics of the group’s malware and development cycle, our research strongly supports the claim that the Infy group is of Iranian origin and potentially connected to the Iranian state. Amongst a backdrop of other incidents, Infy became one of the most frequently observed agents for attempted malware attacks against Iranian civil society beginning in late 2014, growing in use up to the February 2016 parliamentary election in Iran. After the conclusion of the parliamentary election, the rate of attempted intrusions and new compromises through the Infy agent slowed, but did not end. The trends witnessed in reports from recipients are reinforced through telemetry provided by design failures in more recent versions of the Infy malware.

ESET research reveals a successor to the infamous BlackEnergy APT group targeting critical infrastructure, quite possibly in preparation for damaging attacks

GhostEmperor is a Chinese-speaking threat actor that targets government entities and telecom companies in Southeast Asia. They employ a Windows kernel-mode rootkit called Demodex to gain remote control over their targeted servers. The actor demonstrates a high level of sophistication and uses various anti-forensic and anti-analysis techniques to evade detection. They have been active for a significant period of time and continue to pose a threat to their targets.

[GCMAN](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0036) is a threat group that focuses on targeting banks for the purpose of transferring money to e-currency services. (Citation: Securelist GCMAN)

[Evilnum](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0120) is a financially motivated threat group that has been active since at least 2018.(Citation: ESET EvilNum July 2020)

Kaspersky described DarkHotel in a 2014 report as: '... DarkHotel drives its campaigns by spear-phishing targets with highly advanced Flash zero-day exploits that effectively evade the latest Windows and Adobe defenses, and yet they also imprecisely spread among large numbers of vague targets with peer-to-peer spreading tactics. Moreover, this crews most unusual characteristic is that for several years the Darkhotel APT has maintained a capability to use hotel networks to follow and hit selected targets as they travel around the world.'

Golden Eye Dog targets Chinese-speaking users engaged in online gambling, employing techniques such as SERP poisoning, social engineering, and DDoS attacks. The group utilizes trojanized NSIS installers to deliver RONINGLOADER, which executes complex process-injection workflows and deploys a modified Gh0st RAT for espionage. Their operations have included DLL sideloading and the use of watering hole websites to implant Trojans. The group is noted for its high anti-detection capabilities and has been associated with various malware development languages.

Cisco Talos recently discovered a new campaign targeting Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) affecting .gov domains, as well as a private Lebanese airline company. Based on our research, it's clear that this adversary spent time understanding the victims' network infrastructure in order to remain under the radar and act as inconspicuous as possible during their attacks. Based on this actor's infrastructure and TTPs, we haven't been able to connect them with any other campaign or actor that's been observed recently. This particular campaign utilizes two fake, malicious websites containing job postings that are used to compromise targets via malicious Microsoft Office documents with embedded macros. The malware utilized by this actor, which we are calling "DNSpionage," supports HTTP and DNS communication with the attackers. In a separate campaign, the attackers used the same IP to redirect the DNS of legitimate .gov and private company domains. During each DNS compromise, the actor carefully generated Let's Encrypt certificates for the redirected domains. These certificates provide X.509 certificates for TLS free of charge to the user. We don't know at this time if the DNS redirections were successful. In this post, we will break down the attackers' methods and show how they used malicious documents to attempt to trick users into opening malicious websites that are disguised as "help wanted" sites for job seekers. Additionally, we will describe the malicious DNS redirection and the timeline of the events.

This threat actor targets governments, diplomatic missions, private companies in the energy sector, and academics for espionage purposes. The Mask is an advanced threat actor that has been involved in cyber-espionage operations since at least 2007. The name "Mask" comes from the Spanish slang word "Careto" ("Ugly Face" or “Mask”) which the authors included in some of the malware modules. More than 380 unique victims in 31 countries have been observed to date.What makes “The Mask” special is the complexity of the toolset used by the attackers. This includes an extremely sophisticated malware, a rootkit, a bootkit, 32-and 64-bit Windows versions, Mac OS X and Linux versions and possibly versions for Android and iPad/iPhone (Apple iOS).

Buhtrap has been active since 2014, however their first attacks against financial institutions were only detected in August 2015. Earlier, the group had only focused on targeting banking clients. At the moment, the group is known to target Russian and Ukrainian banks. From August 2015 to February 2016 Buhtrap managed to conduct 13 successful attacks against Russian banks for a total amount of 1.8 billion rubles ($25.7 mln). The number of successful attacks against Ukrainian banks has not been identified. Buhtrap is the first hacker group using a network worm to infect the overall bank infrastructure that significantly increases the difficulty of removing all malicious functions from the network. As a result, banks have to shut down the whole infrastructure which provokes delay in servicing customers and additional losses. Malicious programs intentionally scan for machines with an automated Bank-Customer system of the Central Bank of Russia (further referred to as BCS CBR). We have not identified incidents of attacks involving online money transfer systems, ATM machines or payment gates which are known to be of interest for other criminal groups.

[Windshift](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0112) is a threat group that has been active since at least 2017, targeting specific individuals for surveillance in government departments and critical infrastructure across the Middle East.(Citation: SANS Windshift August 2018)(Citation: objective-see windtail1 dec 2018)(Citation: objective-see windtail2 jan 2019)

Adversary group targeting diplomatic missions and governmental organisations.

Digital threat management company RiskIQ tracks the activity of MageCart group and reported their use of web-based card skimmers since 2016.

Between November 2018 and May 2019, senior members of Tibetan groups received malicious links in individually tailored WhatsApp text exchanges with operators posing as NGO workers, journalists, and other fake personas. The links led to code designed to exploit web browser vulnerabilities to install spyware on iOS and Android devices, and in some cases to OAuth phishing pages. This campaign was carried out by what appears to be a single operator that we call POISON CARP.

[TeamTNT](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0139) is a threat group that has primarily targeted cloud and containerized environments. The group as been active since at least October 2019 and has mainly focused its efforts on leveraging cloud and container resources to deploy cryptocurrency miners in victim environments.(Citation: Palo Alto Black-T October 2020)(Citation: Lacework TeamTNT May 2021)(Citation: Intezer TeamTNT September 2020)(Citation: Cado Security TeamTNT Worm August 2020)(Citation: Unit 42 Hildegard Malware)(Citation: Trend Micro TeamTNT)(Citation: ATT TeamTNT Chimaera September 2020)(Citation: Aqua TeamTNT August 2020)(Citation: Intezer TeamTNT Explosion September 2021)

SEXi is a ransomware group that targets VMware ESXi servers, encrypting data and demanding ransom payments. They have been observed encrypting virtual machines and backups, causing significant disruptions to services. The group's name is a play on the word "ESXi," indicating a deliberate focus on these systems. SEXi has been linked to other ransomware variants based on the Babuk source code.

Researchers at FireEye report finding a hacking group (dubbed NOTROBIN) that has been bundling mitigation code for NetScaler servers with its exploits. In effect, the hackers exploit the flaw to get access to the server, kill any existing malware, set up their own backdoor, then block off the vulnerable code from future exploit attempts by mitigation.

This group started operating during the first quarter of 2022. They published samples of alleged stolen data from companies on their site on Tor. It is unclear if they conducted the attacks themselves, or if they bought leaked databases from third parties.

Gorilla is a threat-actor operating a DoS-as-a-service service controlled on Telegram.

ZooPark is a cyberespionage operation that has been focusing on Middle Eastern targets since at least June 2015. The threat actors behind ZooPark infect Android devices using several generations of malware we label from v1-v4, with v4 being the most recent version deployed in 2017.

A group targeting dissident groups in China and at the boundaries.

According to new research by Kaspersky's GReAT team, the online criminal activities of the Roaming Mantis Group have continued to evolve since they were first discovered in April 2018. As part of their activities, this group hacks into exploitable routers and changes their DNS configuration. This allows the attackers to redirect the router user's traffic to malicious Android apps disguised as Facebook and Chrome or to Apple phishing pages that were used to steal Apple ID credentials. Recently, Kaspersky has discovered that this group is testing a new monetization scheme by redirecting iOS users to pages that contain the Coinhive in-browser mining script rather than the normal Apple phishing page. When users are redirected to these pages, they will be shown a blank page in the browser, but their CPU utilization will jump to 90% or higher.

A series of attacks, targeting both Indian military research and south Asian shipping organizations, demonstrate the minimum level of effort required to successfully compromise a target and steal sensitive information. The attackers use very simple malware, which required little development time or skills, in conjunction with freely available Web hosting, to implement a highly effective attack. It is a case of the attackers obtaining a maximum return on their investment. The attack shows how an intelligent attacker does not need to be particularly technically skilled in order to steal the information they are after. The attack begins, as is often the case, with an email sent to the victim. A malicious document is attached to the email, which, when loaded, activates the malware. The attackers use tailored emails to encourage the victim to open the email. For example, one email sent to an academic claimed to be a call for papers for a conference (CFP). The vast majority of the victims were based in India, with some in Malaysia. The victim industry was mostly military research and also shipping based in the Arabian and South China seas. In some instances the attackers appeared to have a clear goal, whereby specific files were retrieved from certain compromised computers. In other cases, the attackers used more of a ‘shotgun’ like approach, copying every file from a computer. Military technologies were obviously the focus of one particular attack with what appeared to be source code stolen. 45 different attacker IP addresses were observed. Out of those, 43 were within the same IP address range based in Sichuan province, China. The remaining two were based in South Korea. The pattern of attacker connections implies that the IP addresses are being used as a VPN, probably in an attempt to render the attackers anonymous.ænThe attacks have been active from at least April 2011 up to February 2012. The attackers are intelligent and focused, employing the minimum amount of work necessary for the maximum gain. They do not use zero day exploits or complicated threats, instead they rely on effective social engineering and lax security measures on the part of the victims.

This threat actor targets Uighurs—a minority ethnic group located primarily in northwestern China—and devices from Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Xiaomi, for espionage purposes.

Treasury has identified a sophisticated cyber-enabled ATM cash out campaign we are calling FASTCash. FASTCash has been active since late 2016 targeting banks in Africa and Asia to remotely compromise payment switch application servers within banks to facilitate fraudulent transactions, primarily involving ATMs, to steal cash equivalent to tens of millions of dollars. FBI has attributed malware used in this campaign to the North Korean government. We expect FASTCash to continue targeting retail payment systems vulnerable to remote exploitation.

This threat actor targets organizations in the satellite communications, telecommunications, geospatial-imaging, and defense sectors in the United States and Southeast Asia for espionage purposes.

An unnamed source leaked almost 10,000 documents describing a large number of 0-day vulnerabilities, methodologies and tools that had been collected by the CIA. This leaking was done through WikiLeaks, since March 2017. In weekly publications, the dumps were said to come from Vault 7 and later Vault 8, until his arrest in 2018. Most of the published vulnerabilities have since been fixed by the respective vendors, by many have been used by other threat actors. This actor turned out to be a former CIA software engineer. (WikiLeaks) Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency. The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election. Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive. "Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

Over the last few weeks, several significant leaks regarding a number of Iranian APTs took place. After analyzing and investigating the documents we conclude that they are authentic. Consequently, this causes considerable harm to the groups and their operation. The identity of the actor behind the leak is currently unknown, however based on the scope and the quality of the exposed documents and information, it appears that they are professional and highly capable. This leak will likely hamstring the groups' operation in the near future. Accordingly, in our assessment this will minimize the risk of potential attacks in the next few months and possibly even year. Note -most of the leaks are posted on Telegram channels that were created specifically for this purpose. Below are the three main Telegram groups on which the leaks were posted: Lab Dookhtegam pseudonym ("The people whose lips are stitched and sealed" –translation from Persian) –In this channel attack tools attributed to the group 'OilRig' were leaked; including a webshell that was inserted into the Technion, various tools that were used for DNS attacks, and more. Green Leakers–In this channel attack tools attributed to the group 'MuddyWatter' were leaked. The group's name and its symbol are identified with the "green movement", which led the protests in Iran after the Presidential elections in 2009. These protests were heavily repressed by the revolutionary guards (IRGC) Black Box–Unlike the previous two channels this has been around for a long time. On Friday May 5th, dozens of confidential documents labeled as "secret" (a high confidentiality level in Iran, one before the highest -top secret) were posted on this channel. The documents were related to Iranian attack groups' activity.

On April 7, 2017, Pytor Levashov — who predominantly used the alias Severa or Peter Severa and whom Falcon Intelligence tracks as ZOMBIE SPIDER — was arrested in an international law enforcement operation led by the FBI. ZOMBIE SPIDER’s specialty was large-scale spam distribution, a fundamental component of cybercrime operations. Levashov was the primary threat actor behind a botnet known as Kelihos and its predecessors, Waledac and Storm. In addition to Levashov’s arrest, there was a technical operation conducted by Falcon Intelligence to seize control of the Kelihos botnet.