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The White Company is a cyberespionage threat actor publicly identified in 2018 and associated with Operation Shaheen, a roughly year-long campaign targeting Pakistani government and military organizations. Its country of origin and sponsoring state have not been established. The actor uses spearphishing emails containing malicious Microsoft Word attachments and lure documents that require victims to open them. Operation Shaheen exploited CVE-2012-0158 and subsequently CVE-2015-1641 to deliver heavily obfuscated, modular versions of publicly available remote-access Trojans. Its toolset has included NetWire. The deployed malware supports credential theft, keylogging, microphone and camera access, and remote desktop control. Compromised Pakistani websites were also used for payload delivery. The White Company emphasizes stealth and resistance to attribution. Its tradecraft includes target-system fingerprinting, security-software discovery, anti-analysis checks, multiple packing and obfuscation methods, decoy documents, and malware self-deletion. A two-stage shellcode sequence prepares the victim system and delivers mission-specific functionality and malware payloads. The actor checks for eight antivirus products and tailors its evasion accordingly. An unusual date-based mechanism progressively stops evading those products, permitting detection sequentially over six months. The operation also uses compromised infrastructure and tools from different developers to obscure attribution.
Mallory correlates actor tradecraft and target patterns against your stack, your sector, and your geography. See overlap before they land.
Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
19 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
1 malware family attributed to this actor across reporting.
3 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 3 of them exploited in the wild.
The first phase of the campaign employed a relatively dated exploit (for the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability), publicly available remote access tools (RATs) ... and external infrastructure for delivery, namely compromised Pakistani websites.
This detection identifies instances where Windows Explorer.exe spawns PowerShell or cmd.exe processes, particularly focusing on executions initiated by LNK files. This behavior is associated with the ZDI-CAN-25373 Windows shortcut zero-day vulnerability, where specially crafted LNK files are used to trigger malicious code execution through cmd.exe or powershell.exe. This technique has been actively exploited by multiple APT groups in targeted attacks through both HTTP and SMB delivery methods.
Starting in December 2017, the lure documents arrived with the malware embedded and attempted to exploit CVE-2015-1641.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Listed as an associated threat actor in detection annotations for Ghostscript exploitation; no specific campaign activity is described in this reference.
Listed as a threat actor associated with the malicious file execution technique detected by this analytic.
Listed in the detection annotations as a threat actor associated with EFI volume mounting / installation-related behavior.
Referenced as a threat actor associated with spearphishing attachment activity involving malicious file execution and potential credential capture via UDL files.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.