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Vanilla Tempest is a financially motivated, human-operated ransomware and extortion threat actor previously tracked as DEV-0832 and also known as Vice Society and Vice Spider. First observed in 2021, it disproportionately targets education, including K–12 schools and higher education institutions. Other targets include healthcare organizations, government entities, nongovernmental organizations, manufacturers, and food retailers and wholesalers. Its victims are distributed globally, with substantial activity in the United States and United Kingdom. The group steals sensitive information before encrypting systems and threatens publication through a dedicated leak site to pressure victims into paying. Historically, Vice Society deployed existing ransomware families, including HelloKitty/Five Hands and Zeppelin. Vanilla Tempest subsequently deployed INC ransomware in September 2024 and has also been observed deploying Rhysida. Its initial-access methods include phishing, compromised credentials, exploitation of internet-facing systems, and access supplied through Gootloader infections. It has exploited PrintNightmare vulnerabilities CVE-2021-1675 and CVE-2021-34527 for privilege escalation and lateral movement. Post-compromise activity includes credential dumping, Active Directory reconnaissance, remote execution through Windows Management Instrumentation and PsExec, and lateral movement using RDP and SMB. Tools and backdoors associated with its operations include SystemBC, PowerShell Empire, Cobalt Strike, and Supper. Persistence mechanisms include scheduled tasks, Windows services, registry autostart entries, and DLL side-loading. Defense evasion includes process injection, masquerading, clearing event logs, and disabling security controls. The actor targets backups and changes compromised network and email account passwords to obstruct recovery. More recent operations have used trojanized Microsoft Teams installers distributed through advertisements and fraudulent download pages. Beginning by June 2025, Vanilla Tempest used Fox Tempest's malware-signing service; observed attack flows included Oyster deployment and subsequent Rhysida ransomware.
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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.
53 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
25 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
20 additional families tracked in Mallory.
2 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 2 of them exploited in the wild.
Software vulnerabilities, such as PrintNightmare (CVE-2021-1675) and (CVE-2021-34527), may be exploited in an attempt to elevate privileges.
"Zerologon is a critical-severity privilege escalation vulnerability in Microsoft’s Netlogon Remote Protocol (CVE-2020-1472, patched 11 August 2020), which attackers can exploit to gain administrative access to a Windows domain controller without any authentication"
98 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.
Previously disrupted ransomware group with assessed, but unconfirmed, operational or personnel overlap with Rhysida.
Vice Spider is attributed as the operator behind the Berlin Landesnetz intrusion. The operation used the TerminalFix social-engineering lure, deployed a loader through DLL sideloading and PNG steganography, established a reverse Python/WebSocket tunnel, exfiltrated approximately 5.8 TB to attacker-controlled Azure storage, and attempted ransomware deployment.
Rhysida-associated cluster that used Fox Tempest's fraudulent malware-signing service to distribute trojanized Microsoft Teams installers through legitimate advertising and fraudulent download pages. Execution could deploy the Oyster backdoor, with Rhysida later observed in some associated intrusion flows.
Reported to use the Supper custom backdoor to establish a foothold before deploying ransomware. The analyzed ClickFix activity has TTP and infrastructure overlap with malware and activity discussed in this attribution context, but the content does not conclusively attribute the campaigns to Vanilla Tempest.
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.