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Arid Viper is a Palestinian, Arabic-speaking cyberespionage threat actor active since at least 2014 and operating from the Palestinian territories, particularly Gaza. It is also known as APT-C-23, Desert Falcon or Desert Falcons, Mantis, Two-tailed Scorpion, and Gaza Cybergang Group 2. Additional tracking names include Big Bang APT, Grey Karkadann, NIOBIUM, Pinstripe Lightning, Renegade Jackal, Scimitar, and TAG-63. Its operations align with Hamas interests, although definitive attribution to a specific Palestinian organization has not been established. Its principal objective is intelligence collection and theft of sensitive information. The group primarily targets Palestinian and Israeli individuals and organizations. Victims include government officials, Fatah members, activists, student groups, journalists, dissidents, security forces, and personnel in defense, law enforcement, and emergency services. Its broader targeting includes government, military, financial, media, education, energy, and think tank organizations across the Middle East. Arid Viper relies heavily on spear-phishing and social engineering, including politically themed decoy documents, malicious archives, attacker-controlled application distribution sites, and fake social media personas. Romance-themed approaches establish trust before persuading victims to install trojanized messaging or dating applications. Its multi-platform toolkit targets Windows, Android, and iOS and includes Micropsia, PyMICROPSIA, Arid Gopher, BarbWire, VolatileVenom, SpyC23, GnatSpy, FrozenCell, VAMP, Desert Scorpion, and the Phenakite iOS implant. These tools provide remote command execution, credential theft, keylogging, screenshots, audio and call recording, location tracking, and collection of files, contacts, messages, and application data. Phenakite incorporates jailbreak functionality to obtain elevated access. The actor maintains access through startup execution mechanisms, registry-based persistence, and mobile background-execution features. It uses obfuscation, anti-analysis checks, covert application behavior, and frequent malware revisions to reduce detection. Observed intrusions have also employed credential dumping, reverse SOCKS tunnels, custom exfiltration utilities, and compartmentalized tool deployments across multiple groups of compromised computers to preserve access.
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.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
53 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
35 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
30 additional families tracked in Mallory.
327 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Palestinian threat actor conducting geopolitically motivated spear-phishing in the Middle East.
Referenced as a group tied to infrastructure observed communicating with potentially vulnerable OpenSSL-exposed systems; described as conducting espionage on behalf of Hamas.
Cyber espionage group active since 2015 using Android and Windows malware and advanced social engineering to target journalists, human rights activists, and military groups.
Assessed as a likely operator behind a deceptive Android trojanized ‘Red Alert’ app campaign targeting people in Israel, using SMS lures impersonating Israel’s Home Front Command to drive APK installation and steal device data.
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.