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OilRig is an Iranian cyber-espionage threat actor widely tracked as APT34 and also known by aliases including Hazel Sandstorm, Evasive Serpens, Cobalt Gypsy, Crambus, Europium, Helix Kitten, ITG13, IRN2, Earth Simnavaz, and TA452. The group is commonly associated with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and is known for persistent regional intelligence collection, particularly against government, telecommunications, and other strategic organizations in the Middle East. Iraqi government infrastructure has been targeted for political, diplomatic, and telecommunications intelligence collection, and more recent reporting links related activity to targeting in Israel. OilRig is characterized by post-compromise tradecraft centered on espionage, modular malware, and living-off-the-land or low-noise operational methods. Observed behavior includes system and environment discovery, registry querying, host profiling, peripheral discovery, credential access from files, and privilege-escalation activity. The actor has been associated with use of Microsoft-hosted services and cloud-based dead-drop channels for command and control, as well as secondary recovery mechanisms to restore cloud access. Reporting in 2026 linked Project CAV3RN to OilRig with low confidence, describing a modular controller-and-plugin framework that evolved from a simpler downloader-executor-uploader design into a more sophisticated post-exploitation platform. A newly documented communication component in that framework used Microsoft Graph and Outlook calendar events as a covert command-and-control and exfiltration channel, with DNS-based fallback for configuration recovery. However, attribution of Project CAV3RN directly to OilRig remains assessed rather than proven, with no direct code reuse or infrastructure overlap publicly established. A subgroup or closely related cluster, Lyceum, also known as Hexane and SiameseKitten, has been described as tied to Iran’s MOIS and considered a sub-group of OilRig in some reporting. Technical overlaps between Lyceum and newer Cavern or HollowGraph activity have been noted, but several of those links remain low confidence. OilRig also overlaps in the broader Iran-linked ecosystem with actors such as MuddyWater in some analyses, though they are generally treated as distinct clusters. Operationally, OilRig has demonstrated reconnaissance, credential access, privilege escalation, scanning, brute-force activity, exfiltration, and post-exploitation capabilities. Publicly documented examples include querying remote desktop-related registry information, checking for user-interaction artifacts such as mouse presence, and running host discovery commands such as hostname and systeminfo. The actor’s overall pattern is sustained intelligence collection and access development in support of Iranian state interests rather than financially motivated crime or ransomware operations.
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.
47 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
46 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
41 additional families tracked in Mallory.
12 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 12 of them exploited in the wild.
OilRig has exploited CVE-2024-30088 to run arbitrary code in the context of 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.
we did produce two reports revolving around the use of a zero-day exploit (CVE-2017-0199). The most notable involved an actor we refer to as BlackOasis and their usage of the exploit in-the-wild prior to its discovery.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
This analytic identifies potential exploitation attempts of ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040, CVE-2022-41082) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server.
7 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
217 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.
Tekide Unveiled APT34 (Muddywater OilRig)
Iran MOIS-linked threat actor referenced because Lyceum is identified as its subgroup in the attribution discussion.
Named as the likely associated Iran-linked espionage group behind Project CAV3RN, but attribution remains low confidence.
Associated with Project CAV3RN cyberespionage activity targeting Israel, using a modular framework with Microsoft Graph/Outlook calendar events for C2 and DNS AAAA-based recovery of cloud C2 configuration.
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.