Palo Alto Unit 42 discovered that an Iranian state-aligned threat actor has been masquerading as the Dubai Airports IT department to deliver trojanized coding challenges to high-value targets. Unit 42 tracks the activity as CL-STA-1178. This activity includes a campaign they call “Blinder Tunnel,” that targeted Iraqi critical infrastructure in March 2026, following infrastructure staging that was observed as early as November 2025. Reaearchers named the campaign Blinder Tunnel after infrastructure terms the attackers used, as well as the malware’s tunneling capabilities.
While other security vendors have discussed individual attacks linked to this activity, this is the first report that not only ties together these disparate attacks as related activity, but tracks the evolving 2026 activity and the Blinder Tunnel campaign as a whole. Palo Alto Unit 42 assess with high confidence that this activity aligns with an Iranian-nexus threat.
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Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
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