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Greenbug is an Iranian espionage threat actor associated with credential theft, covert persistence, and long-term access operations in Middle Eastern and South Asian targets. The group has been linked to custom malware including ISMdoor and ISMAgent, and has also used bespoke ASP.NET webshells such as TwoFace and IntrudingDivisor, alongside commodity and publicly available offensive tooling including Cobalt Strike, Covenant, Mimikatz, PowerShell-based tradecraft, tunneling utilities, and webshells. Greenbug has targeted telecommunications organizations in South Asia and has previously victimized entities in telecommunications, government, aviation, investment, and education. The group has also registered spoofed infrastructure imitating Israeli high-technology and cybersecurity companies, as well as a Saudi industrial firm, indicating targeting interest in Israel and Saudi Arabia. In telecom intrusions, Greenbug demonstrated sustained access over periods of months, with emphasis on stealing credentials, maintaining low-profile persistence, enabling remote access, and validating access to internal database servers. The actor’s tradecraft includes email-based initial access, malicious document exploitation including CVE-2017-0199, CHM and HTA-based execution chains, webshell deployment on IIS and Exchange servers, credential dumping with Mimikatz, decryption of IIS connection strings to recover embedded secrets, lateral movement through remote copying of webshells, PowerShell remoting, service creation, account manipulation, and use of SSH and RDP tunneling tools. Greenbug has shown repeated interest in privileged groups and administrative access, including Exchange-related privileges and domain administrator accounts. A notable characteristic of Greenbug activity is the use of covert command-and-control over DNS. ISMdoor and ISMAgent variants have used DNS tunneling with AAAA and TXT records to exchange commands and exfiltrate data, reflecting an emphasis on stealth and long-term operations. Later ISMdoor versions added broader host reconnaissance, security-product enumeration, keylogging, Powercat-based shell access, and execution of credential theft tooling. Greenbug has also used layered and encrypted webshell designs to conceal functionality and preserve persistence on compromised servers. Greenbug has been discussed as a possible collaborator or precursor access provider in Shamoon-related destructive activity against Saudi organizations, particularly through credential theft ahead of wiper deployment. However, any direct operational relationship with Shamoon remains unproven. Overall, Greenbug is best characterized as an Iran-nexus cyber-espionage actor focused on covert access, credential collection, persistence, and post-compromise enablement within strategically relevant networks.
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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.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
40 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
9 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
4 additional families tracked in Mallory.
1 CVE this actor has used in observed campaigns. 1 of them exploited in the wild.
117 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
10 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Referenced as related background material in a detection rule for IIS connection string decryption; the content does not provide substantive details about Greenbug's activity in the body text.
Espionage campaign targeting telecommunications companies in South Asia, using email-based initial infection, credential theft, living-off-the-land techniques, tunneling, webshells, and attempts to access database servers while maintaining long-term low-profile persistence.
Referenced only as a separate cluster previously linked to ISMDoor; mentioned to contextualize similarities between ISMAgent and ISMDoor DNS-tunneling behavior.
Registered lookalike domains impersonating Israeli high-tech and cybersecurity companies, and used ISMdoor samples and related command-and-control infrastructure in a likely targeting campaign.
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.