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APT33 is an Iranian state-aligned cyber espionage group active since at least 2013 and widely tracked under aliases including Elfin, Holmium, Refined Kitten, Peach Sandstorm, and G0064. The group has been associated with operations supporting Iranian strategic interests and has been linked by multiple security vendors to activity targeting organizations in the aviation, energy, government, healthcare, transportation, defense, and telecommunications sectors, particularly in Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the United States. APT33 is known primarily for intrusion activity against enterprise IT environments, with tradecraft centered on spearphishing, credential theft, password spraying, malware deployment, and persistence through common Windows mechanisms. Reported techniques include use of malicious email attachments for initial access, PowerShell-based execution, credential collection from files, Registry Run Keys and Startup-folder persistence, Windows service creation, and exploitation for privilege escalation. The group has also been observed using commodity and custom remote access tooling, including NanoCore and DarkComet, and has been associated with more tailored multi-stage implants in later Iranian intrusion clusters. The actor’s operations have frequently emphasized long-term access and intelligence collection, though APT33 has also been discussed in connection with destructive Iranian cyber activity, including suspected links to Shamoon-related operations. Public reporting has additionally tied the group or closely related Iranian clusters to cloud-hosted command-and-control infrastructure, web shell usage, and iterative malware development intended to evade signature-based detection. APT33 overlaps in reporting with broader Iranian intrusion ecosystems and is sometimes discussed alongside or within IRGC-linked enterprise intrusion clusters. While vendor naming and clustering vary, APT33 remains the most widely recognized name used by defenders and threat intelligence practitioners for this actor.
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.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
50 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
30 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
25 additional families tracked in Mallory.
5 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 5 of them exploited in the wild.
APT33 has used a publicly available exploit for CVE-2017-0213 to escalate privileges on a local system.
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.
In a recent wave of attacks during February 2019, Elfin attempted to exploit a known vulnerability (CVE-2018-20250) in WinRAR... If successfully exploited on an unpatched computer, the vulnerability could permit an attacker to install any file on the computer, which effectively permits code execution on the targeted computer.
Peach Sandstorm also attempted to exploit vulnerabilities with a public proof-of-concept (POC) in Zoho ManageEngine or Confluence, to access targets’ environments. CVE-2022-47966 is a remote code execution vulnerability affecting a subset of on-premises Zoho ManageEngine products. Microsoft recommends organizations using vulnerable applications patch this vulnerability as multiple groups have been observed exploiting this vulnerability.
The following analytic detects when su runs from a page-cache-corrupted binary... This activity is significant because it indicates a possible privilege escalation attempt, allowing a user to gain root access... CVE CVE-2026-31431 ... References ... copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431
48 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.
Referenced for comparison as another Iranian group that used Azure-backed C2 infrastructure and Run Key masquerading.
Listed as an annotation/tag associated with privilege escalation techniques in the detection content; no campaign or activity by the group is described in this reference.
Listed in annotations associated with the credential-access technique.
Referenced in the detection annotations as a threat actor associated with exploitation for privilege escalation activity.
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.