Loading threat actor…
Bahamut, also tracked as Windshift and Windshift_apt, is a mercenary espionage threat actor active since at least 2016 and associated with highly targeted surveillance operations, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. The group is widely characterized as a private-sector offensive actor or hackers-for-hire operation rather than a conventional financially motivated cybercrime group. Reported victim profiles include human rights activists, diplomats, military personnel, religious figures, business executives, and other high-value individuals. Bahamut/Windshift is known for spearphishing and malicious attachment delivery on desktop platforms, using email lures to harvest credentials and execute malware. On compromised systems, the actor has demonstrated typical post-compromise discovery and profiling behavior, including identifying usernames, computer names, active processes, installed security products, and analysis tools. The group has also used additional payload delivery after initial compromise, HTTP/HTTPS-based command-and-control, Visual Basic 6 payloads, and persistence via Startup-folder LNK files. A defining feature of Bahamut/Windshift activity is mobile espionage, especially against Android users. The actor has operated multiple spyware campaigns using trojanized or counterfeit applications, including operations referred to as Operation BULL and Operation ROCK, as well as later VPN-themed lures. These Android implants have included surveillance capabilities such as contact-list theft, SMS exfiltration, call-log collection, calendar and local account-data theft, location tracking, file collection, installed-app enumeration, and keylogging through abuse of Android accessibility services. Some campaigns used activation-key mechanisms and highly selective distribution, indicating deliberate victim gating and low-volume targeting. Bahamut has also masqueraded malicious apps as legitimate communications, utility, religious, or VPN software to increase trust and constrain exposure. The actor is best understood as a targeted surveillance operator focused on intelligence collection and victim monitoring across desktop and mobile environments, with a strong emphasis on phishing, spyware deployment, persistence, reconnaissance, and 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.
40 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
12 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
7 additional families tracked in Mallory.
2 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 2 of them exploited in the wild.
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.
Attacker exploited one vulnerability (CVE-2017-12824) of InPage to craft bait documents (.inp).
64 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 as an example threat actor associated with the detection's ATT&CK annotations for Linux system binary backdooring/masquerading behavior.
Mentioned only as one of many threat actors associated with the generic discovery technique of running the Linux id command.
Mentioned only as one of many threat actors associated with the Masquerading technique annotation in a Splunk detection entry; no campaign-specific activity is described in this reference.
Listed as an associated threat actor in detection annotations for Ghostscript exploitation; no specific campaign activity is described in this reference.
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.