Operation HangOver, Monsoon, Viceroy Tiger

On Sunday March 17th 2013 the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported that the telecommunications giant Telenor had filed a case with Norwegian criminal police (“KRIPOS”) over what was perceived as an unlawful intrusion into their computer network. The infection was reported to have been conducted via “spear phishing” emails sent to people in the upper tiers of management. Initially, we had no information or visibility into this case. However, after some time Norwegian CERT (NorCERT) shared some data from the event, which included md5 hashes of malicious files and information about which Command and Control servers were used. However, the data we were given acted as a starting point for more data mining, and within a short period of time it became obvious that we were seeing a previously unknown and very extensive infrastructure for targeted attacks. This paper is the result of the ensuing investigation. The samples we have uncovered seem to have been created from approximately September 2010 until the present day. It appears 2012 was a very active year for this group, which saw escalation not only in numbers of created malware files but also in targets. There is no sign that the attacks will slow down in 2013, as we see new attacks continuously. In a great number of isolated cases and contexts, the word “Appin” shows up and there seems to be some connection with the Indian security company called Appin Security Group.