Threat Actors Database

GOLD CABIN is a financially motivated cybercriminal threat group operating a malware distribution service on behalf of numerous customers since 2018. GOLD CABIN uses malicious documents, often contained in password-protected archives, delivered through email to download and execute payloads. The second-stage payloads are most frequently Gozi ISFB (Ursnif) or IcedID (Bokbot), sometimes using intermediary malware like Valak. GOLD CABIN infrastructure relies on artificial appearing and frequently changing URLs created with a domain generation algorithm (DGA). The URLs host a PHP object that returns the malware as a DLL file.

In Q2 2021, the PT Expert Security Center incident response team conducted an investigation in an energy company. The investigation revealed that the company's network had been compromised by an unknown group for the purpose of data theft. They gave the group the name ChamelGang (from the word "chameleon"), because the group disguised its malware and network infrastructure under legitimate services of Microsoft, TrendMicro, McAfee, IBM, and Google.

Antlion is a Chinese state-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) group, who has been targeting financial institutions in Taiwan. This persistent campaign has lasted over the course of at least 18 months.

Samurai Panda is interesting in that their target selection tends to focus on Asia Pacific victims in Japan, the Republic of Korea, and other democratic Asian victims. Beginning in 2009, we’ve observed this actor conduct more than 40 unique campaigns that we’ve identified in the malware configurations’ campaign codes. These codes are often leveraged in the malware used by coordinated targeted attackers to differentiate victims that were successfully compromised from different target sets. The implant delivered by Samurai Panda uses a typical installation process whereby they: 1. Leverage a spear-phish with an exploit to get control of the execution flow of the targeted application. This file “drops” an XOR-encoded payload that unpacks itself and a configuration file. 2. Next, the implant, which can perform in several different modes, typically will install itself as a service and then begin beaconing out to an adversary-controlled host. 3. If that command-and-control host is online, the malicious service will download and instantiate a backdoor that provides remote access to the attacker, who will see the infected host’s identification information as well as the campaign code.

FIN5 is a financially motivated threat group that has targeted personally identifiable information and payment card information. The group has been active since at least 2008 and has targeted the restaurant, gaming, and hotel industries. The group is made up of actors who likely speak Russian.

A group targeting various countries using Denial of Services attacked.

Mandiant observed this group operating since December 2019. Its techniques partially overlap with multiple Russian-based espionage actors (APT28 and APT29). They are described as having a high level of operational security, low malware footprint, adept evasive skills, and a large Internet of Things (IoT) device botnet at their disposal.

Curious Gorge, a group TAG attributes to China's PLA SSF, has conducted campaigns against government and military organizations in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. The actor has remained active against government, military, logistics and manufacturing organizations in Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia. In Russia, long running campaigns against multiple government organizations have continued, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Over the past week, TAG identified additional compromises impacting multiple Russian defense contractors and manufacturers and a Russian logistics company.

TA579, a threat actor that Proofpoint researchers have been tracking since August 2021. This actor frequently delivered BazaLoader and IcedID in past campaigns.

A self-proclaimed hacktivist group that carried out attacks against Iranian railway systems and against Iranian steel plants.

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.

Since 2018, security researchers tracked a financially-motivated cybercrime actor, TA558, targeting hospitality, travel, and related industries located in Latin America and sometimes North America, and western Europe. The actor sends malicious emails written in Portuguese, Spanish, and sometimes English. The emails use reservation-themed lures with business-relevant themes such as hotel room bookings. The emails may contain malicious attachments or URLs aiming to distribute one of at least 15 different malware payloads.

FireEye has observed multiple targeted intrusions occurring in North America — predominately in Canada — dating back to at least 2013 and continuing through at least 2016, in which the attacker(s) have compromised organizations’ networks and sought to monetize this illicit access by exfiltrating sensitive data and extorting victim organizations. In some cases, when the extortion demand was not met, the attacker(s) destroyed production Windows systems by deleting critical operating system files and then shutting down the impacted systems. Based on near parallel TTPs used by the attacker(s) across these targeted intrusions, we believe these clusters of activity are linked to a single, previously unobserved actor or group that we have dubbed FIN10.

This group of cybercriminals is named Malteiroby SCILabs, they operate and distribute the URSA/Mispadu banking trojan.

Hancitor is an information stealer and malware downloader used by a threat actor designated as MAN1, Moskalvzapoe or TA511. In a threat brief from 2018, we noted Hancitor was relatively unsophisticated, but it would remain a threat for years to come. Approximately three years later, Hancitor remains a threat and has evolved to use tools like Cobalt Strike. In recent months, this actor began using a network ping tool to help enumerate the Active Directory (AD) environment of infected hosts. This blog illustrates how the threat actor behind Hancitor uses the network ping tool, so security professionals can better identify and block its use.

One of the most active Qbot malware affiliates, Proofpoint has tracked the large cybercrime threat actor TA570 since 2018.

TA575 is a Dridex affiliate tracked by Proofpoint since late 2020. This group distributes malware such as Dridex, Qakbot, and WastedLocker via malicious URLs, Office attachments, and password-protected files. On average, TA575 distributes almost 4,000 messages per campaign impacting hundreds of organizations.