G0126: Higaisa
Higaisa is a threat group suspected to have South Korean origins. Higaisa has targeted government, public, and trade organizations in North Korea; however, they have also carried out attacks in China, Japan, Russia, Poland, and other nations. Higaisa was first disclosed in early 2019 but is assessed to have operated as early as 2009.[1][2][3]
Security context for executives and security teams
G0126: Higaisa describes [Higaisa](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0126) is a threat group suspected to have South Korean origins. [Higaisa](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0126) has targeted government, public, and trade organizations in North Korea; however, they have also carried out attacks in China, Japan, Russia, Poland, and other nations. [Higaisa](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0126) was first disclosed in early 2019 but is assessed to have operated as early as 2009.(Citation: Malwarebytes Higaisa 2020)(Citation: Zscaler Higais...
Executive priority
G0126: Higaisa 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 G0126: Higaisa 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 G0126: Higaisa 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.
Higaisa
Higaisa is a threat group suspected to have South Korean origins. Higaisa has targeted government, public, and trade organizations in North Korea; however, they have also carried out attacks in China, Japan, Russia, Poland, and other nations. Higaisa was first disclosed in early 2019 but is assessed to have operated as early as 2009.[1][2][3]
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.
Groups, software, and campaigns
S0013: PlugX
S0160: certutil
S0032: gh0st RAT
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 | 1.2 | Current bundle | 17e546bb3ab0… | ||
| 19.1 | 1.2 | Older bundle | df717a491055… |
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]Malwarebytes Higaisa 2020
Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence Team. (2020, June 4). New LNK attack tied to Higaisa APT discovered. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
Open source URL - [2]Zscaler Higaisa 2020
Singh, S. Singh, A. (2020, June 11). The Return on the Higaisa APT. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
Open source URL - [3]PTSecurity Higaisa 2020
PT ESC Threat Intelligence. (2020, June 4). COVID-19 and New Year greetings: an investigation into the tools and methods used by the Higaisa group. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
Open source URL - [4]mitre-attackG0126Open source URL
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