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Nickel Alley is a North Korea-linked threat group assessed to operate on behalf of the North Korean government. It is associated with the Contagious Interview campaign, in which technology professionals are approached with fraudulent job opportunities and drawn into fake interview or skills-assessment workflows that culminate in malware execution. Reported aliases include CL-STA-0240, Tenacious Pungsan, and Storm-1877. The group primarily targets software developers and other technology-sector professionals, with particular emphasis on individuals connected to finance, Web3, blockchain, and broader technology environments. Operations commonly rely on recruiter impersonation, fake company personas, fraudulent professional-network profiles, and coordinated developer-platform accounts to build credibility. Victims are persuaded to download code, clone repositories, install packages, or run local commands under the guise of completing interview tasks or troubleshooting assessment errors. Nickel Alley has used ClickFix-style social engineering to induce victims to execute commands that deploy PyLangGhost RAT, a Python-based successor to GoLangGhost RAT. Observed tooling and delivery chains have also involved malicious or typosquatted package repositories, compromised package ecosystems, fake GitHub projects, malicious Visual Studio Code tasks, and follow-on payloads including BeaverTail and OtterCookie. Documented capabilities include arbitrary command execution, system profiling, credential theft, session theft, file exfiltration, and theft of cryptocurrency wallet data from browser extensions. The group has also shown the ability to tailor payload delivery based on victim and system characteristics. The dominant objective appears to be financial gain through cryptocurrency theft, but the actor’s targeting of developers and attempts to induce malware execution on corporate systems indicate potential secondary uses of initial access for supply chain compromise and corporate espionage. Nickel Alley’s tradecraft combines targeted social engineering with malware delivery and post-compromise collection, making it a notable DPRK operator focused on developer-centric intrusion pathways.
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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.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
21 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
4 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
32 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
4 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Targets software developers through fake job interview and recruitment lures to deliver malware and steal cryptocurrency, while also seeking initial access for supply chain compromise or corporate espionage.
Referenced as a named threat actor or activity cluster in a Sophos report title; no further operational details are provided in the content itself.
Conducts Contagious Interview campaigns targeting technology professionals with fake job opportunities, fake LinkedIn/company pages, GitHub repositories, ClickFix lures, and malicious npm/typosquatted packages to deliver malware for cryptocurrency theft, supply chain compromise, and possible corporate espionage.
Targets professionals in the technology sector using fake job opportunities and a fraudulent interview process to deliver malware as part of the Contagious Interview campaign.
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.