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Equation Group is a highly sophisticated cyber-espionage threat actor widely linked in public reporting to the U.S. National Security Agency, often specifically associated with Tailored Access Operations. Publicly documented activity dates to at least 2001, with some assessments placing its origins as early as 1996. The actor is known for long-term computer network exploitation operations, selective victim targeting, exceptional operational security, and a large multi-platform malware and exploit arsenal spanning Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, JunOS, and other Unix-like environments. Equation Group is associated with advanced frameworks and implants including EquationDrug, GrayFish, DoubleFantasy, TripleFantasy, Fanny, DanderSpritz, PeddleCheap, DoublePulsar, Bvp47, SECONDDATE, NOPEN, STOICSURGEON, INCISION, SUCTIONCHAR, and numerous privilege-escalation, persistence, and remote exploitation tools later exposed through the Shadow Brokers leaks. Its tooling demonstrates deep engineering maturity, including modular plugin architectures, encrypted virtual file systems, kernel-mode and user-mode components, passive and active backdoors, covert communications, process injection, rootkit functionality, network interception, credential collection, keylogging, browser and clipboard monitoring, removable-media operations, and in some cases hard-disk or SSD firmware manipulation. The actor has shown strong post-exploitation tradecraft. DanderSpritz functioned as a full-featured post-exploitation ecosystem with modules for persistence, credential theft, keylogging, packet capture, memory dumping, SQL and Oracle interaction, and remote command execution. EquationDrug and related platforms supported victim-specific customization, stealthy registry-based configuration, rootkit-assisted concealment, and passive network backdoors triggered by crafted traffic. Bvp47 illustrates the group’s Linux capability and use of covert command channels, encrypted activation, and relay-based operations involving internal pivot hosts. Equation Group has also been publicly associated with operations against air-gapped environments through Fanny and with highly targeted intrusions into telecommunications, government, military, academia, science, energy, financial, media, transportation, aerospace, oil and gas, and encryption-related organizations. Reported victim geography spans dozens of countries. Public reporting specifically identifies targeting in countries including China, Korea, Japan, Germany, Spain, India, and Mexico, and broader historical reporting indicates extensive global reach. Aliases include Equation and Equation Group. The actor is frequently used as a benchmark for technical sophistication alongside groups such as Regin, ProjectSauron, Duqu2, and the Lamberts/Longhorn.
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.
66 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
55 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
50 additional families tracked in Mallory.
4 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 4 of them exploited in the wild.
The most famous vulnerability is without a doubt CVE-2010-2568, aka the “Stuxnet LNK exploit”. ... Fanny had used that exploit even before Stuxnet ... Flame, Gauss and miniFlame continued to use it afterwards.
...as evidenced with Equation team’s reuse of CVE-2013-3918 within a couple of days of its initial use by the Aurora actors [3].
Resource 106, once decompressed, is a driver called hidsvc.sys. It is loaded into the kernel by invoking the EpMe exploit of CVE-2017-0005 (this is the very same exploit that had its logic find its way into the Jian exploit somehow).
each of those systems were hit by tools handed down from the Equation Group and Shadow Brokers, namely EternalBlue and DoublePulsar... IDS rules, viz. MS17-010 TRANS2 SECONDARY REQUEST and MS17-010 Echo Response. They were all found to be attempts to exploit SMB vulnerabilities.
47 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.
Sophisticated NSA-associated cyber operation whose offensive tools were allegedly stolen and leaked by Shadow Brokers.
Shadowy hacking operation widely believed to be run by the NSA; its offensive cyber tools were allegedly stolen and leaked by the Shadow Brokers.
The content references Equation Group only as a tag and does not provide substantive details about its activity in the article body.
Associated with the Fast16 cyber sabotage framework, a precision industrial sabotage platform targeting engineering and simulation software by patching floating-point arithmetic routines to subtly alter modeling results.
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.