C0023: Operation Ghost
Operation Ghost was an APT29 campaign starting in 2013 that included operations against ministries of foreign affairs in Europe and the Washington, D.C. embassy of a European Union country. During Operation Ghost, APT29 used new families of malware and leveraged web services, steganography, and unique C2 infrastructure for each victim.[1]
Security context for executives and security teams
C0023: Operation Ghost describes [Operation Ghost](https://attack.mitre.org/campaigns/C0023) was an [APT29](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0016) campaign starting in 2013 that included operations against ministries of foreign affairs in Europe and the Washington, D.C. embassy of a European Union country. During [Operation Ghost](https://attack.mitre.org/campaigns/C0023), [APT29](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0016) used new families of malware and leveraged web services, steganography, and unique C2 infrastructure for each victim.(Citation: ES...
Executive priority
C0023: Operation Ghost is an official MITRE ATT&CK campaign. Glexia treats it as defensive behavior context for prioritizing monitoring, control validation, and response planning without using the object by itself as an attribution claim.
Technical view
Security teams should validate C0023: Operation Ghost by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (the mapped ATT&CK tactic context), supported platforms (the platforms named in the official object), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.
Likely telemetry
- Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata
Detection direction
- Validate whether C0023: Operation Ghost appears in your detection coverage and tabletop scenarios.
- Use the object to align executive risk language with SOC, incident response, and detection engineering work.
- Do not treat ATT&CK relationship context as attribution without corroborating evidence.
Mitigation priorities
- Map the object to existing controls and identify missing telemetry or response ownership.
- Prioritize mitigations that reduce exposure on the listed platforms and tactics.
- Review adjacent ATT&CK relationships before changing policy, detections, or reporting language.
Additional notes and limits
Baseline Glexia take generated from the official MITRE ATT&CK STIX object, source hash, tactics, platforms, and detection fields. It is safe to replace with a richer model-generated take for the same source hash later.
This baseline take is source-grounded and schema-validated, but it does not include environment-specific telemetry, incident evidence, or threat-intelligence corroboration.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Operation Ghost
Operation Ghost was an APT29 campaign starting in 2013 that included operations against ministries of foreign affairs in Europe and the Washington, D.C. embassy of a European Union country. During Operation Ghost, APT29 used new families of malware and leveraged web services, steganography, and unique C2 infrastructure for each victim.[1]
How security teams should use this page
Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.
Techniques used
This mirrors the MITRE pattern of making group, software, campaign, and technique relationships scannable. Relationship notes come from mirrored ATT&CK relationship text when available.
| Domain | ID | Name | Relationship / procedure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | T1078.002 | Domain AccountsSub-technique | For Operation Ghost, APT29 used stolen administrator credentials for lateral movement on compromised networks.[1] |
| Enterprise | T1102.002 | Bidirectional CommunicationSub-technique | For Operation Ghost, APT29 used social media platforms to hide communications to C2 servers.[1] |
| Enterprise | T1583.001 | DomainsSub-technique | For Operation Ghost, APT29 registered domains for use in C2 including some crafted to appear as existing legitimate domains.[1] |
| Enterprise | T1587.001 | MalwareSub-technique | For Operation Ghost, APT29 used new strains of malware including FatDuke, MiniDuke, RegDuke, and PolyglotDuke.[1] |
| Enterprise | T1546.003 | Windows Management Instrumentation Event SubscriptionSub-technique | During Operation Ghost, APT29 used WMI event subscriptions to establish persistence for malware.[1] |
| Enterprise | T1585.001 | Social Media AccountsSub-technique | For Operation Ghost, APT29 registered Twitter accounts to host C2 nodes.[1] |
| Enterprise | T1027.003 | SteganographySub-technique | During Operation Ghost, APT29 used steganography to hide payloads inside valid images.[1] |
| Enterprise | T1001.002 | SteganographySub-technique | During Operation Ghost, APT29 used steganography to hide the communications between the implants and their C&C servers.[1] |
Groups, software, and campaigns
G0016: APT29
APT29 is threat group that has been attributed to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).[1][2] They have operated since at least 2008, often targeting government networks in Europe and NATO member countries, research institutes, and think tanks. APT29 reportedly compromised the Democratic National Committee starting in the summer of 2015.[3][4][5][6]
In April 2021, the US and UK governments attributed the SolarWinds Compromise to the SVR; public statements included citations to APT29, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes.[7][8] Industry reporting also referred to the actors involved in this campaign as UNC2452, NOBELIUM, StellarParticle, Dark Halo, and SolarStorm.[9][10][11][12][13][14]
S0512: FatDuke
S0051: MiniDuke
S0511: RegDuke
S0518: PolyglotDuke
PolyglotDuke is a downloader that has been used by APT29 since at least 2013. PolyglotDuke has been used to drop MiniDuke.[1]
S0029: PsExec
All related ATT&CK context
Object version and sync metadata
The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates.
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
| Release | Bundle imported | Object version | Modified | Status | Raw hash |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19.2 | 1.0 | Current bundle | a3f6e64b4344… | ||
| 19.1 | 1.0 | Older bundle | b31062900907… |
Mirrored ATT&CK source object
The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.
External references and citations
MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.
- [1]ESET Dukes October 2019
Faou, M., Tartare, M., Dupuy, T. (2019, October). OPERATION GHOST. Retrieved September 23, 2020.
Open source URL - [2]mitre-attackC0023Open source URL
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