Threat Actors Database

• 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. • We observed POISON CARP employing a total of eight Android browser exploits and one Android spyware kit, as well as one iOS exploit chain and iOS spyware. None of the exploits that we observed were zero days. POISON CARP overlaps with two recently reported campaigns against the Uyghur community. The iOS exploit and spyware we observed was used in watering hole attacks reported by Google Project Zero, and a website used to serve exploits by POISON CARP was also observed in a campaign called “Evil Eye” reported by Volexity. The Android malware used in the campaign is a fully featured spyware kit that has not been previously documented. • POISON CARP appears to have used Android browser exploits from a variety of sources. In one case, POISON CARP used a working exploit publicly released by Exodus Intelligence for a Google Chrome bug that was fixed in source, but whose patch had not yet been distributed to Chrome users. In other cases, POISON CARP used lightly modified versions of Chrome exploit code published on the personal GitHub pages of a member of Qihoo 360’s Vulcan Team, a member of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, and by a Google Project Zero member on the Chrome Bug Tracker. • This campaign is the first documented case of one-click mobile exploits used to target Tibetan groups, and reflects an escalation in the sophistication of digital espionage threats targeting the community.

Putter Panda is the name of bad actor responsible for a series of cyberespionage operations originating in Shanghai, security experts linked its operation to the activity of the People’s Liberation Army 3rd General Staff Department 12th Bureau Unit 61486. A fake yoga brochure was one of different emails used for a spear-phishing campaign conducted by the stealth Chinese cyber unit according an investigation conducted by researchers at the CrowdStrike security firm. Also in this case the experts believe that we are facing with a large scale cyberespionage campaign targeting government entities, contractors and research companies in Europe, USA and Japan. The group has been operating since at least 2007 and appears very interested in research companies in the space and satellite industry, experts at CrowdStrike have collected evidence of a numerous attacks against these industries.

Throughout 2017 and 2018 Unit 42 has been tracking and observing a series of highly targeted attacks focused in South East Asia, building on our research into the KHRAT Trojan. Based on the evidence, these attacks appear to be conducted by the same set of attackers using previously unknown malware families. In addition, these attacks appear to be highly targeted in their distribution of the malware used, as well as the targets chosen. Based on these factors, Unit 42 believes the attackers behind these attacks are conducting their campaigns for espionage purposes. We believe this group is previously unidentified and therefore have we have dubbed it “Rancor”. The Rancor group’s attacks use two primary malware families which we describe in depth later in this blog and are naming DDKONG and PLAINTEE. DDKONG is used throughout the campaign and PLAINTEE appears to be new addition to these attackers’ toolkit. Kaspersky found connections between this group and DragonOK .

Security researchers have uncovered a new Russian-speaking hacking group that they claim has been focusing on the past three years on corporate espionage, targeting companies across the world to steal documents that contain commercial secrets and employee personal data. Named RedCurl, the activities of this new group have been detailed in a 57-page report released today by cyber-security firm Group-IB. The company has been tracking the group since the summer of 2019 when it was first called to investigate a security breach at a company hacked by the group. Since then, Group-IB said it identified 26 other RedCurl attacks, carried out against 14 organizations, going as far back as 2018.

Some research organizations link this group to Lazarus Group, Hidden Cobra, Labyrinth Chollima . ( FireEye ) Read our report, APT37 (Reaper): The Overlooked North Korean Actor, to learn more about our assessment that this threat actor is working on behalf of the North Korean government, as well as various other details about their operations: • Targeting: Primarily South Korea – though also Japan, Vietnam and the Middle East – in various industry verticals, including chemicals, electronics, manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, and healthcare. • Initial Infection Tactics: Social engineering tactics tailored specifically to desired targets, strategic web compromises typical of targeted cyberespionage operations, and the use of torrent file-sharing sites to distribute malware more indiscriminately. • Exploited Vulnerabilities: Frequent exploitation of vulnerabilities in Hangul Word Processor (HWP), as well as Adobe Flash. The group has demonstrated access to zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-0802), and the ability to incorporate them into operations. • Command and Control Infrastructure: Compromised servers, messaging platforms, and cloud service providers to avoid detection. The group has shown increasing sophistication by improving their operational security over time. • Malware: A diverse suite of malware for initial intrusion and exfiltration. Along with custom malware used for espionage purposes, APT37 also has access to destructive malware.

Recorded Future has identified a suspected Chinese state-sponsored group that we track as Threat Activity Group 22 (TAG-22) targeting telecommunications, academia, research and development, and government organizations in Nepal, the Philippines, Taiwan, and more historically, Hong Kong. In this most recent activity, the group likely used compromised GlassFish servers and Cobalt Strike in initial access operations before switching to the bespoke Winnti, ShadowPad, and Spyder backdoors for long-term access using dedicated actor-provisioned command and control infrastructure. Also see Earth Lusca .

RedFoxtrot has been active since at least 2014 and predominantly targets government, defense, and telecommunications sectors across Central Asia, India, and Pakistan, aligning with the likely operational remit of Unit 69010. Of particular note, within the past 6 months, Insikt Group detected RedFoxtrot network intrusions targeting 3 Indian aerospace and defense contractors; major telecommunications providers in Afghanistan, India, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan; and multiple government agencies across the region. RedFoxtrot maintains large amounts of operational infrastructure and has likely employed both bespoke and publicly available malware families commonly used by Chinese cyber espionage groups, including Icefog, PlugX, Royal Road, Poison Ivy, ShadowPad, and PCShare. RedFoxtrot activity overlaps with threat groups tracked by other security vendors as Temp.Trident and Nomad Panda.

The commoditization of Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) allows criminals to obtain financial benefits at a low risk and with little technical background. One such popular product in the underground economy is ransomware. In ransomware attacks, data from infected systems is held hostage (encrypted) until a fee is paid to the criminals. This modus operandi disrupts legitimate businesses, which may become unavailable until the data is restored. A recent blackmailing strategy adopted by criminals is to leak data online from the infected systems if the ransom is not paid. Besides reputational damage, data leakage might produce further economical losses due to fines imposed by data protection laws. Thus, research on prevention and recovery measures to mitigate the impact of such attacks is needed to adapt existing countermeasures to new strains.

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.

Newsbeef/Newscaster will find a way to compromise a web site, usually the vulnerability appears to be CMS related, in an outdated WordPress plugin, Joomla version, or Drupal version. Attackers usually perform one of two things, Newsbeef has been performing the first of the two: - inject a src or iframe link into web pages or css sheets - inject the content of an entire BeEF web page into one of the internally linked javascript helpers The injected link will redirect visitors’ browsers to a BeEF server. Usually, the attackers deliver some of the tracking and system/browser identification and evercookie capabilities. Sometimes, it appears that they deliver the metasploit integration to exploit and deliver backdoors (we haven’t identified that exploitation activity in our ksn data related to this group just yet). Sometimes, it is used to pop up spoofed login input fields to steal social networking site credentials. We also haven’t detected that in ksn, but some partners have privately reported it about various incidents. But we have identified that attackers will redirect specific targets to laced Adobe Flash and other installers from websites that they operate. So, the watering hole activity isn’t always and usually isn’t delivering backdoors. Most of the time, the watering hole injections are used to identify and track visitors or steal their browser history. Then, they deliver the backdoors to the right targets. There is some infrastructure overlap with Magic Hound, APT 35, Cobalt Illusion, Charming Kitten and ITG18 .

In July 2021, several phishing documents created in Georgian were discovered by NSFOCUS Security Labs. In these phishing documents, the attackers used current political hotspots in Georgia to create bait and deliver a secret stealing Trojan to specifically targeted victims aiming to steal various documents from their computers. Correlation analysis shows that this phishing campaign and an earlier phishing attack against the Ukrainian government came from the same unknown threat entity, most likely composed of Russian hackers. From April to July of 2021, the group launched several phishing attacks applying a large number of network resources located in Russia. In order to facilitate ongoing tracking, NSFOCUS Security Labs has tentatively dubbed the hacker group Lorec53 by extracting special names from related Trojans.

GhostEmperor is a Chinese-speaking threat actor that has mostly focused on targets in Southeast Asia, including several government entities and telecom companies. The group stands out because it uses a formerly unknown Windows kernel-mode rootkit. Rootkits provide remote control access over the servers they target. Acting covertly, rootkits are notorious for hiding from investigators and security solutions. To bypass the Windows Driver Signature Enforcement mechanism, GhostEmperor uses a loading scheme involving a component of an open-source project named “Cheat Engine.” This advanced toolset is unique and Kaspersky researchers see no similarity to already known threat actors. Kaspersky experts have surmised that the toolset has been in use since at least July 2020.

An actor mainly targeting Pakistan military targets, active since at least 2012. We have low confidence that this malware might be authored by an Indian company. To spread the malware, they use unique implementations to leverage the exploits of known vulnerabilities (such as CVE-2017-11882) and later deploy a Powershell payload in the final stages.

Group-IB has exposed the attacks committed by Silence cybercriminal group. While the gang had previously targeted Russian banks, Group-IB experts also have discovered evidence of the group’s activity in more than 25 countries worldwide. Group-IB has published its first detailed report on tactics and tools employed by Silence. Group-IB security analysts’ hypothesis is that at least one of the gang members appears to be a former or current employee of a cyber security company. The confirmed damage from Silence activity is estimated at 800 000 USD. Silence is a group of Russian-speaking hackers, based on their commands language, the location of infrastructure they used, and the geography of their targets (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Poland, and Kazakhstan). Although phishing emails were also sent to bank employees in Central and Western Europe, Africa, and Asia). Furthermore, Silence used Russian words typed on an English keyboard layout for the commands of the employed backdoor. The hackers also used Russian-language web hosting services. Group-IB found several relationships between Silence and TA505, Graceful Spider, Gold Evergreen .

Check Point Research identified an ongoing surveillance operation targeting a Southeast Asian government. The attackers use spear-phishing to gain initial access and leverage old Microsoft Office vulnerabilities together with the chain of in-memory loaders to attempt and install a previously unknown backdoor on victim’s machines. Our investigation shows the operation was carried out by what we believe is a Chinese APT group that has been testing and refining the tools in its arsenal for at least 3 years.

The revelation about the existence of yet another potentially nation-state driven spyware occurred in March 2014 when Le Monde first published information about top secret slides originating from 2011 and part of their content. But the slides Le Monde published revealed only a small part of the picture – several slides were cut out, some information was redacted. Germany’s Der Spiegel re-published the slide set with far less deletions recently, in January 2015, and therefore gave a deeper insight about what CSEC actually says they have tracked down. The newly published documents reveal: the so called operation SNOWGLOBE, was discovered in 2009 (slide 9) and consists of three different “implants”, two were dubbed snowballs and one “more sophisticated implant, discovered in mid-2010” is tagged as snowman (slide 7). According to slide 22, “CSEC assesses, with moderate certainty, SNOWGLOBE to be a state-sponsored CNO [Cyber Network Operation] effort, put forth by a French intelligence agency.” The information given dates back to 2011 and nothing else has been published since. Now that specific Babar samples have been identified and analyzed, there might be new information, also with regards to similarities or differences between the two Remote Administration Tools (RATs) EvilBunny and Babar.

A previously unknown Chinese hacking group known as 'Space Pirates' targets enterprises in the Russian aerospace industry with phishing emails to install novel malware on their systems. The threat group is believed to have started operating in 2017, and while it has links to known groups like APT 41 (Winnti), Mustang Panda, Bronze President , and Emissary Panda, APT 27, LuckyMouse, Bronze Union , it is thought to be a new cluster of malicious activity. Russian threat analysts at Positive Technologies named the group 'Space Pirates' due to their espionage operations focusing on stealing confidential information from companies in the aerospace field.

In March 2016, Symantec published a blog on Suckfly, an advanced cyberespionage group that conducted attacks against a number of South Korean organizations to steal digital certificates. Since then we have identified a number of attacks over a two-year period, beginning in April 2014, which we attribute to Suckfly. The attacks targeted high-profile targets, including government and commercial organizations. These attacks occurred in several different countries, but our investigation revealed that the primary targets were individuals and organizations primarily located in India. While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group’s custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran, the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions. This suggests that these attacks were part of a planned operation against specific targets in India.

Strider has been active since at least October 2011. The group has maintained a low profile until now and its targets have been mainly organizations and individuals that would be of interest to a nation state’s intelligence services. Symantec obtained a sample of the group’s Remsec malware from a customer who submitted it following its detection by our behavioral engine. Remsec is primarily designed to spy on targets. It opens a back door on an infected computer, can log keystrokes, and steal files. Strider has been highly selective in its choice of targets and, to date, Symantec has found evidence of infections in 36 computers across seven separate organizations. The group’s targets include a number of organizations and individuals located in Russia, an airline in China, an organization in Sweden, and an embassy in Belgium.

This report describes a campaign of targeted spyware attacks carried out by a sophisticated operator, which we call Stealth Falcon. The attacks have been conducted from 2012 until the present, against Emirati journalists, activists, and dissidents. We discovered this campaign when an individual purporting to be from an apparently fictitious organization called “The Right to Fight” contacted Rori Donaghy. Donaghy, a UK-based journalist and founder of the Emirates Center for Human Rights, received a spyware-laden email in November 2015, purporting to offer him a position on a human rights panel. Donaghy has written critically of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government in the past, and had recently published a series of articles based on leaked emails involving members of the UAE government. Circumstantial evidence suggests a link between Stealth Falcon and the UAE government. We traced digital artifacts used in this campaign to links sent from an activist’s Twitter account in December 2012, a period when it appears to have been under government control. We also identified other bait content employed by this threat actor. We found 31 public tweets sent by Stealth Falcon, 30 of which were directly targeted at one of 27 victims. Of the 27 targets, 24 were obviously linked to the UAE, based on their profile information (e.g., photos, “UAE” in account name, location), and at least six targets appeared to be operated by people who were arrested, sought for arrest, or convicted in absentia by the UAE government, in relation to their Twitter activity.