T1021.004: SSH

FIN7 is a financially-motivated threat group that has been active since 2013. FIN7 has targeted the retail, restaurant, hospitality, software, consulting, financial services, medical equipment, cloud services, media, food and beverage, transportation, pharmaceutical, and utilities industries in the United States. A portion of FIN7 was operated out of a front company called Combi Security and often used point-of-sale malware for targeting efforts. Since 2020, FIN7 shifted operations to big game hunting (BGH), including use of REvil ransomware and their own Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), Darkside. FIN7 may be linked to the Carbanak Group, but multiple threat groups have been observed using Carbanak, leading these groups to be tracked separately.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

Lazarus Group is a North Korean state-sponsored cyber threat group attributed to the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). [1] [2] Lazarus Group has been active since at least 2009 and is reportedly responsible for the November 2014 destructive wiper attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, identified by Novetta as part of Operation Blockbuster. Malware used by Lazarus Group correlates to other reported campaigns, including Operation Flame, Operation 1Mission, Operation Troy, DarkSeoul, and Ten Days of Rain.[3]

North Korea’s cyber operations have shown a consistent pattern of adaptation, forming and reorganizing units as national priorities shift. These units frequently share personnel, infrastructure, malware, and tradecraft, making it difficult to attribute specific operations with high confidence. Public reporting often uses “Lazarus Group” as an umbrella term for multiple North Korean cyber operators conducting espionage, destructive attacks, and financially motivated campaigns.[4][5][6]

Leviathan is a Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage group that has been attributed to the Ministry of State Security's (MSS) Hainan State Security Department and an affiliated front company.[1] Active since at least 2009, Leviathan has targeted the following sectors: academia, aerospace/aviation, biomedical, defense industrial base, government, healthcare, manufacturing, maritime, and transportation across the US, Canada, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.[1][2][3][4]

Scattered Spider is a native English-speaking cybercriminal group active since at least 2022. [1] [2] The group initially targeted customer relationship management (CRM) providers, business process outsourcing (BPO) firms, and telecommunications and technology companies before expanding in 2023 to gaming, hospitality, retail, managed service provider (MSP), manufacturing, and financial sectors. [2] Scattered Spider relies heavily on social engineering, including impersonating IT and help-desk staff, to gain initial access, bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), and compromise enterprise networks. The group has adapted its tooling to evade endpoint detection and response (EDR) defenses and used ransomware for financial gain. [3] [4] [5] Scattered Spider had expanded into hybrid cloud and identity environments, using help-desk impersonation and MFA bypass to obtain administrator access in Okta, AWS, and Office 365. [6]

BlackTech is a suspected Chinese cyber espionage group that has primarily targeted organizations in East Asia--particularly Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong--and the US since at least 2013. BlackTech has used a combination of custom malware, dual-use tools, and living off the land tactics to compromise media, construction, engineering, electronics, and financial company networks.[1][2][3]

Aquatic Panda is a suspected China-based threat group with a dual mission of intelligence collection and industrial espionage. Active since at least May 2020, Aquatic Panda has primarily targeted entities in the telecommunications, technology, and government sectors.[1]

GCMAN is a threat group that focuses on targeting banks for the purpose of transferring money to e-currency services. [1]

Fox Kitten is threat actor with a suspected nexus to the Iranian government that has been active since at least 2017 against entities in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Australia, and North America. Fox Kitten has targeted multiple industrial verticals including oil and gas, technology, government, defense, healthcare, manufacturing, and engineering.[1][2][3][4]

TeamTNT is a threat group that has primarily targeted cloud and containerized environments. The group as been active since at least October 2019 and has mainly focused its efforts on leveraging cloud and container resources to deploy cryptocurrency miners in victim environments.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

Storm-1811 is a financially-motivated entity linked to Black Basta ransomware deployment. Storm-1811 is notable for unique phishing and social engineering mechanisms for initial access, such as overloading victim email inboxes with non-malicious spam to prompt a fake "help desk" interaction leading to the deployment of adversary tools and capabilities.[1][2][3][4]

Salt Typhoon is a People's Republic of China (PRC) state-backed actor that has been active since at least 2019 and responsible for numerous compromises of network infrastructure at major U.S. telecommunication and internet service providers (ISP). Salt Typhoon has targeted and leveraged public facing network edge devices to gain access to victim environments. Salt Typhoon has been publicly associated with activities resembling other security industry reported activity groups to include OPERATOR PANDA, RedMike, GhostEmperor, and UNC5807.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

OilRig is a suspected Iranian threat group that has targeted Middle Eastern and international victims since at least 2014. The group has targeted a variety of sectors, including financial, government, energy, chemical, and telecommunications. It appears the group carries out supply chain attacks, leveraging the trust relationship between organizations to attack their primary targets. The group works on behalf of the Iranian government based on infrastructure details that contain references to Iran, use of Iranian infrastructure, and targeting that aligns with nation-state interests.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

Empire is an open-source, cross-platform remote administration and post-exploitation framework that is publicly available on GitHub. While the tool itself is primarily written in Python, the post-exploitation agents are written in pure PowerShell for Windows and Python for Linux/macOS. Empire was one of five tools singled out by a joint report on public hacking tools being widely used by adversaries.[1][2][3]

Cobalt Strike is a commercial, full-featured, remote access tool that bills itself as “adversary simulation software designed to execute targeted attacks and emulate the post-exploitation actions of advanced threat actors”. Cobalt Strike’s interactive post-exploit capabilities cover the full range of ATT&CK tactics, all executed within a single, integrated system.[1]

In addition to its own capabilities, Cobalt Strike leverages the capabilities of other well-known tools such as Metasploit and Mimikatz.[1]

reGeorg is an open-source web shell written in Python that can be used as a proxy to bypass firewall rules and tunnel data in and out of targeted networks.[1][2]

Kinsing is Golang-based malware that runs a cryptocurrency miner and attempts to spread itself to other hosts in the victim environment. [1][2][3]

Qilin is a ransomware family operated as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) that has been active since at least 2022. It includes variants written in Go and Rust capable of targeting Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi environments. Qilin shares functionality overlaps with Black Basta, REvil, and BlackCat ransomware. Qilin affiliates have targeted multiple entities worldwide with the majority of victims in the US, France, Canada, and the UK, primarily in the manufacturing, technology, financial services, and healthcare sectors.[1][2][3][4][5]

The AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure is a campaign where human operators used Claude Code AI and OpenAI GPT GPT-4.1 AI to perform reconnaissance, vulnerability exploitation, privilege escalation, discovery, credential harvesting, and exfiltration operations. The attack impacted several Mexican government institutions including the Federal Tax Authority (Servicio de Administracion Tributaria), Mexico State Government (Estado de Mexico), Mexico City Civil Registry (Registro Civil de CDMX), Jalisco State Government, National Electoral Institute (Instituto Nacional Electoral), Michoacan State Government, SADM Monterrey Municipal Water Utility (Agua y Drenaje), Tamaulipas State Government, and the Mexico City Health Department (Salud CDMX). The attack resulted in the theft of large amounts of sensitive government data and civilian records. Please note that due to the breadth of this campaign, public reporting only provides select details and as a result this campaign should not be considered comprehensive.[1]

Cutting Edge was a campaign conducted by suspected China-nexus espionage actors, variously identified as UNC5221/UTA0178 and UNC5325, that began as early as December 2023 with the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure (previously Pulse Secure) VPN appliances. Cutting Edge targeted the U.S. defense industrial base and multiple sectors globally including telecommunications, financial, aerospace, and technology. Cutting Edge featured the use of defense evasion and living-off-the-land (LoTL) techniques along with the deployment of web shells and other custom malware.[1][2][3][4][5]

C0032 was an extended campaign suspected to involve the Triton adversaries with related capabilities and techniques focused on gaining a foothold within IT environments. This campaign occurred in 2019 and was distinctly different from the Triton Safety Instrumented System Attack.[1]

Leviathan Australian Intrusions consisted of at least two long-term intrusions against victims in Australia by Leviathan, relying on similar tradecraft such as external service exploitation followed by extensive credential capture and re-use to enable privilege escalation and lateral movement. Leviathan Australian Intrusions were focused on exfiltrating sensitive data including valid credentials for the victim organizations.[1]