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APT33 is an Iran-linked, state-sponsored cyberespionage group also tracked as Elfin, Holmium, Peach Sandstorm, Refined Kitten, Magnallium, and Hive0016. It targets aerospace, energy, and defense organizations, including industrial firms in the United States and Gulf states. Its operations emphasize intelligence collection, credential theft, and data exfiltration; it has also used destructive wiper malware and targeted industrial control systems. The group gains initial access through spearphishing messages containing malicious links or archive attachments, password spraying, and abuse of valid accounts. It combines custom malware with publicly available tools, including LaZagne, Mimikatz, and ProcDump, to harvest and dump credentials. APT33 has used valid accounts and a publicly available exploit for CVE-2017-0213 to escalate privileges. It establishes persistence through scheduled tasks that repeatedly execute malicious scripts, Base64-encodes payloads to obscure their contents, and uses WinRAR to compress collected data before exfiltration.
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.
39 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
41 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
36 additional families tracked in Mallory.
5 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 5 of them exploited in the wild.
APT33 has used a publicly available exploit for CVE-2017-0213 to escalate privileges on a local system.
In February 2019, the group attempted to exploit a known vulnerability (CVE-2018-20250) in WinRAR in order to compromise an organization in the chemical sector in Saudi Arabia.
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.
Peach Sandstorm also attempted to exploit vulnerabilities with a public proof-of-concept (POC) in Zoho ManageEngine or Confluence, to access targets’ environments. CVE-2022-47966 is a remote code execution vulnerability affecting a subset of on-premises Zoho ManageEngine products. Microsoft recommends organizations using vulnerable applications patch this vulnerability as multiple groups have been observed exploiting this vulnerability.
The following analytic detects when su runs from a page-cache-corrupted binary... This activity is significant because it indicates a possible privilege escalation attempt, allowing a user to gain root access... CVE CVE-2026-31431 ... References ... copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431
77 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.
Listed in the detection's technique annotations; the content does not attribute ShieldCrash exploitation to this group.
Listed in the detection annotation metadata.
Iranian state-linked actor targeting aviation and energy, including destructive operations against Saudi organizations.
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.