G0123: Volatile Cedar
Volatile Cedar is a Lebanese threat group that has targeted individuals, companies, and institutions worldwide. Volatile Cedar has been operating since 2012 and is motivated by political and ideological interests.[1][2]
Security context for executives and security teams
G0123: Volatile Cedar describes [Volatile Cedar](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0123) is a Lebanese threat group that has targeted individuals, companies, and institutions worldwide. [Volatile Cedar](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0123) has been operating since 2012 and is motivated by political and ideological interests.(Citation: CheckPoint Volatile Cedar March 2015)(Citation: ClearSky Lebanese Cedar Jan 2021)
Executive priority
G0123: Volatile Cedar is an official MITRE ATT&CK group. 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 G0123: Volatile Cedar 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 G0123: Volatile Cedar 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.
Volatile Cedar
Volatile Cedar is a Lebanese threat group that has targeted individuals, companies, and institutions worldwide. Volatile Cedar has been operating since 2012 and is motivated by political and ideological interests.[1][2]
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 | T1595.002 | Vulnerability ScanningSub-technique | Volatile Cedar has performed vulnerability scans of the target server.[1][2] |
| Enterprise | T1595.003 | Wordlist ScanningSub-technique | Volatile Cedar has used DirBuster and GoBuster to brute force web directories and DNS subdomains.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1505.003 | Web ShellSub-technique | Volatile Cedar can inject web shell code into a server.[1][2] |
| Enterprise | T1105 | Ingress Tool Transfer | Volatile Cedar can deploy additional tools.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1190 | Exploit Public-Facing Application | Volatile Cedar has targeted publicly facing web servers, with both automatic and manual vulnerability discovery.[1] [2] |
Groups, software, and campaigns
S0572: Caterpillar WebShell
Caterpillar WebShell is a self-developed Web Shell tool created by the group Volatile Cedar.[1]
S0569: Explosive
Explosive is a custom-made remote access tool used by the group Volatile Cedar. It was first identified in the wild in 2015.[1][2]
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 | 1.1 | Current bundle | 558a90b24679… | ||
| 19.1 | 1.1 | Older bundle | 5d0003751dab… |
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]CheckPoint Volatile Cedar March 2015
Threat Intelligence and Research. (2015, March 30). VOLATILE CEDAR. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
Open source URL - [2]ClearSky Lebanese Cedar Jan 2021
ClearSky Cyber Security. (2021, January). “Lebanese Cedar” APT Global Lebanese Espionage Campaign Leveraging Web Servers. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
Open source URL - [3]Lebanese Cedar
(Citation: ClearSky Lebanese Cedar Jan 2021)
- [4]Volatile Cedar
(Citation: CheckPoint Volatile Cedar March 2015)
- [5]mitre-attackG0123Open source URL
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