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MuddyWater is an Iranian government-sponsored advanced persistent threat group subordinate to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). First observed in 2017, it has supported MOIS objectives since approximately 2018, primarily through cyber espionage and the theft of sensitive information. It is also tracked as Mango Sandstorm, MERCURY, Seedworm, Static Kitten, Earth Vetala, TEMP.Zagros, TA450, Boggy Serpens, Cobalt Ulster, ITG17, and Yellow Nix. Its targets include government, telecommunications, military and defense, academic, transportation, industrial, and oil and natural gas organizations. Operations span Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, with a historical emphasis on the Middle East and Central Asia and documented targeting in Turkey and Tajikistan. The group gains access through targeted spearphishing links and attachments, including messages sent from compromised third-party accounts, and exploitation of known vulnerabilities. Documented exploitation includes CVE-2017-0199 in Microsoft Office, CVE-2020-1472 in Windows Netlogon, CVE-2020-0688 in Microsoft Exchange, and CVE-2025-3248 in Langflow. MuddyWater combines malicious documents, macros, PowerShell, and VBScript with publicly available tools and legitimate remote-management software. It has abused ConnectWise, ScreenConnect, Remote Utilities, and SimpleHelp for access, persistence, lateral movement, and detection evasion. Its malware portfolio includes the PowGoop loader and the Small Sieve, Canopy/Starwhale, Mori, and POWERSTATS backdoors. These tools provide persistent access, remote command execution, reconnaissance, and command-and-control communication, including through Telegram and DNS tunneling. MuddyWater uses Mimikatz, ProcDump, LaZagne, and other utilities to obtain operating-system, browser, domain, and email credentials. Persistence mechanisms include scheduled tasks, registry autorun entries, startup folders, and Office template modification. Defense-evasion techniques include DLL side-loading, masquerading, multilayer script encoding, Invoke-Obfuscation, and the use of proxies and compromised infrastructure. The group performs system and network discovery, captures screenshots, and exfiltrates information through its command-and-control infrastructure. It has also deployed ransomware, although espionage remains its dominant documented motivation.
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.
68 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
56 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
51 additional families tracked in Mallory.
35 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 35 of them exploited in the wild.
Clearsky has detected new and advanced attack vector used by MuddyWater to target governmental entities and the telecommunication sector. Notably, the TTP includes decoy documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 as the first stage of the attack.
FBI, CISA, CNMF, and NCSC-UK have observed this APT group recently exploiting ... the Microsoft Exchange memory corruption vulnerability (CVE-2020-0688).
Dragonfly has exploited a Windows Netlogon vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) to obtain access to Windows Active Directory servers. Earth Lusca, FIN7, menuPass, MuddyWater, and Wizard Spider are also associated with its exploitation or attempted exploitation.
MuddyWater has been observed conducting a broad reconnaissance campaign across more than 12,000 internet-exposed systems by exploiting known security flaws in internet-exposed ... Langflow ... systems. The list of exploited vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2025-34291 - Langflow remote code execution vulnerability
PaperCut faced widespread exploitation in 2023 involving CVE-2023-27350, which attackers used to obtain unauthenticated administrative access and execute code.
30 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
1,148 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.
Mentioned only as a comparison for abuse of commercial cloud proxy services to conceal server addresses. The content does not connect MuddyWater to the UAC-0099 campaign.
Listed as an annotation to a renamed-Python-binary detection; no actor-specific campaign or behavior is described.
MuddyWater is listed in the detection's annotations.
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.