Israel-Hamas war spotlight: Shaking the rust off SysJoker

Amid tensions in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, Check Point Research has been conducting active threat hunting in an effort to discover, attribute, and mitigate relevant regional threats. Among those, some new variants of the SysJoker malware, including one coded in Read More …

TA402 Uses Complex IronWind Infection Chains to Target Middle East-Based Government Entities

In mid-2023, Proofpoint researchers first identified TA402 (Molerats, Gaza Cybergang, Frankenstein, WIRTE) activity using a labyrinthine infection chain to target Middle Eastern governments with a new initial access downloader Proofpoint has dubbed IronWind. From July through October 2023, TA402 utilized Read More …

WIRTE’s campaign in the Middle East ‘living off the land’ since at least 2019

This February, during our hunting efforts for threat actors using VBS/VBA implants, Kaspersky researchers came across MS Excel droppers that use hidden spreadsheets and VBA macros to drop their first stage implant. The implant itself is a VBS script with Read More …

Molerats Delivers Spark Backdoor to Government and Telecommunications Organizations

Between October 2019 through the beginning of December 2019, Unit 42 observed multiple instances of phishing attacks likely related to a threat group known as Molerats (AKA Gaza Hackers Team and Gaza Cybergang) targeting eight organizations in six different countries Read More …

New Cyber Espionage Campaigns Targeting Palestinians: The Spark and Pierogi Campaigns

Over the last several months, the Cybereason Nocturnus team has been tracking recent espionage campaigns targeting the Middle East. These campaigns are specifically directed at entities and individuals in the Palestinian territories. This investigation shows multiple similarities to previous attacks Read More …