Threat Actors Database

Cleaver is a threat group that has been attributed to Iranian actors and is responsible for activity tracked as Operation Cleaver. Strong circumstantial evidence suggests Cleaver is linked to Threat Group 2889 (TG-2889). This group evolved into Magic Hound, APT 35, Cobalt Illusion, Charming Kitten .

Islamic State Hacking Division or United Cyber Caliphate refers to any number of group self-identifying as the digital army for Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. The cyber security group had pledged allegiance to Jeremy An and his objectives in late 2014. Their recent claims and hacks have led FBI director James Comey to state that his agency does not yet have the capabilities to limit ISIL attempts to recruit Americans through social media. Russian military hackers have been identified as using the CyberCaliphate nomer to cover several hacking attacks, notably on TV5Monde and the Twitter of US CENTCOM. A list of names and details said to be of American military personnel was released by unknown parties who said they were part of the ISHD, but doubts were raised on the source and nature of the data.

DarkHydrus is a threat group that has targeted government agencies and educational institutions in the Middle East since at least 2016. The group heavily leverages open-source tools and custom payloads for carrying out attacks. Some analysts track Dark Hydrus, APT 19, Deep Panda, C0d0so0 and Turbine Panda, APT 26, Shell Crew, WebMasters, KungFu Kittens as the same group, but it is unclear from open source information if the groups are the same.

DarkUniverse is an interesting example of a full cyber-espionage framework used for at least eight years. The malware contains all the necessary modules for collecting all kinds of information about the user and the infected system and appears to be fully developed from scratch. Due to unique code overlaps, we assume with medium confidence that DarkUniverse’s creators were connected with the ItaDuke set of activities. The attackers were resourceful and kept updating their malware during the full lifecycle of their operations, so the observed samples from 2017 are totally different from the initial samples from 2009. The suspension of its operations may be related to the publishing of the ‘Lost in Translation’ leak, or the attackers may simply have decided to switch to more modern approaches and start using more widely available artefacts for their operations.

In this blog post, we’ll be focusing on DeathStalker: a unique threat group that appears to target law firms and companies in the financial sector (although we’ve occasionally seen them in other verticals as well). As far as we can tell, this actor isn’t motivated by financial gain. They don’t deploy ransomware, steal payment information to resell it, or engage in any type of activity commonly associated with the cybercrime underworld. Their interest in gathering sensitive business information leads us to believe that DeathStalker is a group of mercenaries offering hacking-for-hire services, or acting as some sort of information broker in financial circles. DeathStalker first came to our attention through a PowerShell-based implant called Powersing. By unraveling this thread, we were able to identify activities dating back to 2018, and possibly even 2012. There is activity overlap with Evilnum .

In late January 2018, ASERT discovered a new modular malware framework we call “yty”. The framework shares a striking resemblance to the EHDevel framework. We believe with medium confidence that a team we call internally as “Donot Team” is responsible for the new malware and will resume targeting of South Asia. In a likely effort to disguise the malware and its operations, the authors coded several references into the malware for football—it is unclear whether they mean American football or soccer. The theme may allow the network traffic to fly under the radar. The actors use false personas to register their domains instead of opting for privacy protection services. Depending on the registrar service chosen, this could be seen as another cost control measure. The actors often used typo-squatting to slightly alter a legitimate domain name. In contrast, the registration information used accurate spelling, possibly indicating the domain naming was intentional, typos included. Each unique registrant usually registered only a few domains, but mistakenly reused phone numbers or the registration data portrayed a similar pattern across domains.

CrowdStrike Intelligence has identified a new ransomware variant identifying itself as BitPaymer. This new variant was behind a series of ransomware campaigns beginning in June 2019, including attacks against the City of Edcouch, Texas and the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture. We have dubbed this new ransomware DoppelPaymer because it shares most of its code with the BitPaymer ransomware operated by Indrik Spider . However, there are a number of differences between DoppelPaymer and BitPaymer, which may signify that one or more members of Indrik Spider have split from the group and forked the source code of both Dridex and BitPaymer to start their own Big Game Hunting ransomware operation. DoppelPaymer has been observed to be distributed by Smoke Loader (operated by Smoky Spider ) and Emotet (operated by Mummy Spider, TA542 ).

Microsoft threat actor profile from the public naming mapping feed.

Earth Ammit, a threat actor linked to Chinese-speaking APT groups, launched two waves of campaigns from 2023 to 2024. The first wave, VENOM, mainly targeted software service providers, and the second wave, TIDRONE mainly targeted the military industry. In its VENOM campaign, Earth Ammit's approach involved penetrating the upstream segment of the drone supply chain. In the VENOM campaign, the threat actors primarily relied on open-source tools due to low cost and difficult tracking. They shifted to custom-built tools like CXCLNT and CLNTEND in the TIDRONE campaign for cyberespionage purposes. Victims of the TIDRONE and VENOM campaigns primarily originated from Taiwan and South Korea, affecting a range of industries including military, satellite, heavy industry, media, technology, software services, and healthcare sectors. Earth Ammit’s long-term goal is to compromise trusted networks via supply chain attacks, allowing them to target high-value entities downstream and amplify their reach. Organizations that fall prey to these attacks are also at risk of data theft, including exfiltration of credentials and screenshots.

For the last two years we have been monitoring a Russian-language cyberespionage actor that focuses on Central Asian users and diplomatic entities. We named the actor DustSquad and have provided private intelligence reports to our customers on four of their campaigns involving custom Android and Windows malware. In this blogpost we cover a malicious program for Windows called Octopus that mostly targets diplomatic entities. The name was originally coined by ESET in 2017 after the 0ct0pus3.php script used by the actor on their old C2 servers. We also started monitoring the malware and, using Kaspersky Attribution Engine based on similarity algorithms, discovered that Octopus is related to DustSquad, something we reported in April 2018. In our telemetry we tracked this campaign back to 2014 in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia (still mostly Russian-speaking), plus Afghanistan.

EmpireMonkey is an advanced financially motivated cybercriminal gang. The group gained notoriety for a heist they conducted in February 2019 against the Maltese Bank of Valletta, which initially resulted in roughly €13 million in losses, though much of this was subsequently recovered or frozen. While a thorough post-mortem of the Bank of Valletta attack has yet to be made public, it is highly likely that the threat actors sent malicious spear phishing emails to employees at Bank of Valletta and other European financial institutions. In October 2018, HSBC Malta reported receiving phishing emails that bore hallmarks of the subsequent EmpireMonkey attack against Bank of Valletta. This group seems to be directly related to Carbanak, Anunak and/or FIN7 .

Dragonfly is a cyberespionage group that has been active since at least 2011. They initially targeted defense and aviation companies but shifted to focus on the energy sector in early 2013. They have also targeted companies related to industrial control systems. According to Kaspersky, Crouching Yeti has been operating since at least 2010 and has infected roughly 2,800 targets in 38 countries, and in industries as diverse as education and pharmaceuticals. A similar group emerged in 2015 and was identified by Symantec as Berserk Bear, Dragonfly 2.0 . There is debate over the extent of the overlap between Dragonfly and Dragonfly 2.0, but there is sufficient evidence to lead to these being tracked as two separate groups.

For the past two years, Sygnia’s Incident Response (IR) team has been tracking a financially motivated threat group targeting and infiltrating organizations from the finance and commerce sector in Latin America. The attack is relentless in its ingenious simplicity serving as an ideal tactic to hide in plain sight, without any need to develop exploits. Using an arsenal of over 80 unique tools & scripts, the group executes its attacks patiently over long periods of time, blending in with the target’s environment and going completely undetected while it quietly liberates organizations of exorbitant amounts of money. We are dubbing this group – Elephant Beetle. Elephant Beetle seems to primarily focus on the Latin American market, but that doesn’t mean that organizations that are not based there are safe. Sygnia’s IR team discovered and responded to an incident at a U.S. based company with an operations branch in Latin America. As such, both regional and global organizations should be on their guard. The group is highly proficient with Java based attacks and, in many cases, target legacy Java applications running on Linux-based machines as the means for initial entry to the network. Not only that, the group even deploys their own complete Java Web Application on the victim machine to do their bidding while the machine also runs the intentional application. This report is a technical play-by-play of the Elephant Beetle attack as detected, observed and mitigated by Sygnia’s IR team. Elephant Beetle resembles the group tracked by Mandiant as FIN13 .

Threat Group-3390 is a Chinese threat group that has extensively used strategic Web compromises to target victims. The group has been active since at least 2010 and has targeted organizations in the aerospace, government, defense, technology, energy, and manufacturing sectors. Emissary Panda has some overlap with Turbine Panda, APT 26, Shell Crew, WebMasters, KungFu Kittens and possibly UNC215 . This actor worked together with TA428 in Operation StealthyTrident.

FireEye tracks a threat group that we call “FIN4,” whose intrusions seem to have a different objective: to obtain an edge in stock trading. FIN4 appears to conduct intrusions that are focused on a single objective: obtaining access to insider information capable of making or breaking the stock prices of public companies. The group specifically targets the emails of C-level executives, legal counsel, regulatory, risk, and compliance personnel, and other individuals who would regularly discuss confidential, market-moving information. FIN4 has targeted over 100 companies since at least mid-2013. All of the targeted organizations are either public companies or advisory firms that provide services to public companies (such as investor relations, legal, and investment banking firms). Over two-thirds of the targeted organizations are healthcare and pharmaceutical companies. FIN4 probably focuses on these types of organizations because their stocks can move dramatically in response to news of clinical trial results, regulatory decisions, or safety and legal issues.

FIN6 is a cybercrime group that has stolen payment card data and sold it for profit on underground marketplaces. This group has aggressively targeted and compromised point of sale (PoS) systems in the hospitality and retail sectors. ( FireEye ) FIN6 is a cybercriminal group intent on stealing payment card data for monetization. In 2015, FireEye Threat Intelligence supported several Mandiant Consulting investigations in the hospitality and retail sectors where FIN6 actors had aggressively targeted and compromised point-of-sale (POS) systems, making off with millions of payment card numbers. Through iSIGHT, we learned that the payment card numbers stolen by FIN6 were sold on a “card shop” — an underground criminal marketplace used to sell or exchange payment card data.

To compromise targeted networks, GALLIUM target unpatched internet-facing services using publicly available exploits and have been known to target vulnerabilities in WildFly/JBoss. Once persistence is established in a network, GALLIUM uses common techniques and tools like Mimikatz to obtain credentials that allows for lateral movement across the target network. Within compromised networks, GALLIUM makes no attempt to obfuscate their intent and are known to use common versions of malware and publicly available toolkits with small modifications. The operators rely on low cost and easy to replace infrastructure that consists of dynamic-DNS domains and regularly reused hop points. This activity from GALLIUM has been identified predominantly through 2018 to mid-2019. GALLIUM is still active; however, activity levels have dropped when compared to what was previously observed.

Members of this group have accounts on popular Iranian hacker forums such as ashiyane[.]org and shabgard[.]org, and they have engaged in website defacements under the group name “AjaxTM” since 2010. By 2014, the Ajax Security Team had transitioned from performing defacements (their last defacement was in December 2013) to malware-based espionage, using a methodology consistent with other advanced persistent threat actors in this region. ( Crowdstrike ) CrowdStrike Intelligence has also been tracking and reporting internally on this threat group since mid-January 2014 under the name FLYING KITTEN, and since that time has seen targeting of multiple U.S.-based defense contractors as well as political dissidents.

In early 2020 Kaspersky published a report based on its investigation of an ongoing attack campaign called “FunnyDream”. This Chinese-speaking actor has been active for at least a few years and possesses different implants with various capabilities. Since mid-2018, researchers at Kaspersky saw continuing high activity from this threat actor and among their targets were a number of high-level government organisations as well as some political parties from various Asian countries including the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The campaign comprises a number of cyber espionage tools with various capabilities. As of the latest monitoring of the global cybersecurity company, FunnyDream's espionage attacks are still ongoing.

Today, Mandiant Intelligence is releasing a comprehensive report detailing FIN12, an aggressive, financially motivated threat actor behind prolific ransomware attacks since at least October 2018. FIN12 is unique among many tracked ransomware-focused actors today because they do not typically engage in multi-faceted extortion and have disproportionately impacted the healthcare sector. They are also the first FIN actor that we are promoting who specializes in a specific phase of the attack lifecycle—ransomware deployment—while relying on other threat actors for gaining initial access to victims. This specialization reflects the current ransomware ecosystem, which is comprised of various loosely affiliated actors partnering together, but not exclusively with one another.