T1485: Data Destruction

APT38 is a North Korean state-sponsored threat group that specializes in financial cyber operations; it has been attributed to the Reconnaissance General Bureau.[1] Active since at least 2014, APT38 has targeted banks, financial institutions, casinos, cryptocurrency exchanges, SWIFT system endpoints, and ATMs in at least 38 countries worldwide. Significant operations include the 2016 Bank of Bangladesh heist, during which APT38 stole $81 million, as well as attacks against Bancomext [2] and Banco de Chile [2]; some of their attacks have been destructive.[1][2][3][4]

North Korean group definitions are known to have significant overlap, and some security researchers report all North Korean state-sponsored cyber activity under the name Lazarus Group instead of tracking clusters or subgroups.

Sandworm Team is a destructive threat group that has been attributed to Russia's General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST) military unit 74455.[1][2] This group has been active since at least 2009.[3][4][5][6]

In October 2020, the US indicted six GRU Unit 74455 officers associated with Sandworm Team for the following cyber operations: the 2015 and 2016 attacks against Ukrainian electrical companies and government organizations, the 2017 worldwide NotPetya attack, targeting of the 2017 French presidential campaign, the 2018 Olympic Destroyer attack against the Winter Olympic Games, the 2018 operation against the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and attacks against the country of Georgia in 2018 and 2019.[1][2] Some of these were conducted with the assistance of GRU Unit 26165, which is also referred to as APT28.[7]

Storm-0501 is a financially motivated cyber criminal group that uses commodity and open-source tools to conduct ransomware operations. Storm-0501 has been active since 2021 and has previously been affiliated with Sabbath Ransomware and other Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) variants such as Hive, BlackCat, Hunters International, LockBit 3.0, and Embargo ransomware.[1][2][3][4]

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]

LAPSUS$ is cyber criminal threat group that has been active since at least mid-2021. LAPSUS$ specializes in large-scale social engineering and extortion operations, including destructive attacks without the use of ransomware. The group has targeted organizations globally, including in the government, manufacturing, higher education, energy, healthcare, technology, telecommunications, and media sectors.[1][2][3]

VOID MANTICORE is a threat group assessed to operate on behalf of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).[1] Active since at least mid-2022, VOID MANTICORE has targeted government entities, critical infrastructure, and private sector organizations across Albania, Israel, and the United States.[1][2] VOID MANTICORE conducts destructive cyber operations, combining wiper attacks with hack-and-leak campaigns. The group has operated under multiple public-facing personas, including HomeLand Justice in operations against Albania, Karma and Karma Below in campaigns targeting Israeli organizations, and Handala Hack, its current primary persona, which has claimed activity against Israeli and U.S. entities, including a March 2026 attack against Stryker Corporation.[1][3] VOID MANTICORE has been observed collaborating with Scarred Manticore, which has been linked to initial access operations preceding VOID MANTICORE’s activity.[4]

TeamPCP is a financially-motivated, cloud-native threat group that has been active since at least September 2025. Initially focused on ransomware and cryptocurrency theft, TeamPCP shifted in early 2026 to systematic, worm-driven credential theft and software supply chain attacks targeting Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflows. TeamPCP has monetized access through extortion and through partnerships with ransomware actors including Vect and CipherForce.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

ShinyHunters is a cyber criminal collective that has been active since at least 2019 operating under the ShinyCorp persona. ShinyHunters has targeted multiple industries and geographic regions gathering legitimate credentials and personally identifiable information (PII) for resale or extortion of victims. ShinyHunters has been associated with the broader collective called The Community, also known as The Com whose members have also included Scattered Spider and LAPSUS$. Public reporting has mentioned a variety of names for operations ShinyHunters members have reportedly conducted with members of other groups, including “Scattered Lapsus Hunters,” “Scattered Lapsus Shiny Hunters,” and “SLSH.”[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

PowerDuke is a backdoor that was used by APT29 in 2016. It has primarily been delivered through Microsoft Word or Excel attachments containing malicious macros. [1]

AcidRain is an ELF binary targeting modems and routers using MIPS architecture.[1] AcidRain is associated with the ViaSat KA-SAT communication outage that took place during the initial phases of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Analysis indicates overlap with another network device-targeting malware, VPNFilter, associated with Sandworm Team.[1] US and European government sources linked AcidRain to Russian government entities, while Ukrainian government sources linked AcidRain specifically to Sandworm Team.[2][3]

Proxysvc is a malicious DLL used by Lazarus Group in a campaign known as Operation GhostSecret. It has appeared to be operating undetected since 2017 and was mostly observed in higher education organizations. The goal of Proxysvc is to deliver additional payloads to the target and to maintain control for the attacker. It is in the form of a DLL that can also be executed as a standalone process. [1]

Olympic Destroyer is malware that was used by Sandworm Team against the 2018 Winter Olympics, held in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The main purpose of the malware was to render infected computer systems inoperable. The malware leverages various native Windows utilities and API calls to carry out its destructive tasks. Olympic Destroyer has worm-like features to spread itself across a computer network in order to maximize its destructive impact.[1][2]

DynoWiper is a destructive malware associated with the 2025 Poland Wiper Attacks in December of 2025. DynoWiper is a native Windows binary that is distributed by a PowerShell script and overwrites files using data generated by the Mersenne Twister algorithm before they are deleted from the system. Multiple variants of DynoWiper have been identified, with the primary differences being that one variant shuts down the system after completing its destructive operations, and another introduces a time delay between file overwriting and deletion.[1][2]

ShrinkLocker is a VBS-based malicious script that leverages the legitimate Bitlocker application to encrypt files on victim systems for ransom. ShrinkLocker functions by using Bitlocker to encrypt files, then renames impacted drives to the adversary’s contact email address to facilitate communication for the ransom payment.[1][2]

Apostle is malware that has functioned as both a wiper and, in more recent versions, as ransomware. Apostle is written in .NET and shares various programming and functional overlaps with IPsec Helper.[1]

WhisperGate is a multi-stage wiper designed to look like ransomware that has been used against multiple government, non-profit, and information technology organizations in Ukraine since at least January 2022.[1][2][3]

AcidPour is a variant of AcidRain designed to impact a wider range of x86 architecture Linux devices. AcidPour is an x86 ELF binary that expands on the targeted devices and locations in AcidRain by including items such as Unsorted Block Image (UBI), Deice Mapper (DM), and various flash memory references. Based on this expanded targeting, AcidPour can impact a variety of device types including IoT, networking, and ICS embedded device types.[1] AcidPour is a wiping payload associated with the Sandworm Team threat actor, and potentially linked to attacks against Ukrainian internet service providers (ISPs) in 2023.[2]

SameCoin is a multi-platform wiper with Windows and Android versions that has been used by WIRTE to target entities in the Middle East including in Israel.[1]

Diavol is a ransomware variant first observed in June 2021 that is capable of prioritizing file types to encrypt based on a pre-configured list of extensions defined by the attacker. The Diavol Ransomware-as-a Service (RaaS) program is managed by Wizard Spider and it has been observed being deployed by Bazar.[1][2][3][4]

Kazuar is a fully featured, multi-platform backdoor Trojan written using the Microsoft .NET framework. [1]

2025 Poland Wiper Attacks is a Russian state-sponsored campaign that conducted destructive cyberattacks against Polish energy infrastructure in December 2025. Targets included more than 30 wind and photovoltaic farms, a combined heat and power (CHP) plant, and a manufacturing sector company. The attacks on the distributed energy resources (DER) disrupted communications between affected facilities and the distribution system operator, but did not impact electricity generation or heat supply. Across the campaign, threat actors deployed two previously undocumented wiper tools, DynoWiper, a Windows-based wiper and LazyWiper, a PowerShell wiper, distributed via malicious Group Policy Objects. At the CHP plant, threat actors had maintained access since at least March 2025, using that foothold to obtain credentials and move laterally before attempting wiper deployment. Some reporting has assessed the activity to be consistent with Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) threat activity group Dragonfly, also tracked as STATIC TUNDRA, while other reporting attributes the destructive wiper activities to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) threat activity group ELECTRUM, also tracked as Sandworm Team.[1][2][3][4]

The 2022 Ukraine Electric Power Attack was a Sandworm Team campaign that used a combination of GOGETTER, Neo-REGEORG, CaddyWiper, and living of the land (LotL) techniques to gain access to a Ukrainian electric utility to send unauthorized commands from their SCADA system.[1][2]