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APT39 is an Iranian state-aligned cyber espionage threat actor active since at least 2014. It is widely tracked under multiple aliases including Chafer, Remix Kitten, ITG07, Cadelle, and Burgundy Sandstorm. The group is primarily associated with intelligence collection, with a particular emphasis on gathering personal information and supporting surveillance objectives against individuals of interest, including perceived dissidents. Reported targeting has included government, telecommunications, and travel-related organizations, with operations also linked to airlines in the Middle East and Africa. APT39 is assessed to operate in support of Iranian strategic interests and has been characterized as methodical and espionage-focused rather than overtly disruptive. Its victimology and tradecraft indicate a strong interest in long-term access, collection of sensitive organizational and personal data, and monitoring of communications and travel-related information. The group commonly relies on spearphishing with malicious attachments for initial access and user execution. Post-compromise activity includes use of HTTP for command-and-control communications, as well as use of cloud services such as Dropbox for command-and-control file exchange. APT39 has also employed proxying tools to relay command-and-control traffic and customized publicly available tooling, including PLINK and Mimikatz. Observed capabilities attributed to APT39 include persistence via Windows Startup folder abuse, Windows Registry querying for host and environment discovery, file and directory discovery, username collection, clipboard theft, data aggregation prior to exfiltration, and theft of files from compromised systems. Malware associated with the group has also been reported to decrypt encrypted CAB archives. Remexi is one malware family linked to the actor and has been used for host reconnaissance, including username collection. APT39 overlaps with the broader ecosystem of Iranian intrusion activity that targets regional and international entities across government and commercial sectors. Its operations are consistently associated with espionage, surveillance enablement, and collection of personally identifiable and operationally useful information rather than financially motivated crime.
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.
54 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
25 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
20 additional families tracked in Mallory.
9 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 9 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.
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.
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.
The following analytic detects attempts to exploit CVE-2022-26134, an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Confluence... This activity is significant as it allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the Confluence server without authentication, potentially leading to full system compromise.
4 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
2 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 associated threat actor in the detection annotation for exploitation of the public-facing PTC Windchill vulnerability CVE-2026-4681.
Listed in the detection annotations as a threat actor associated with this analytic context.
Named threat actor referenced in global threat reporting.
Listed as a threat actor associated with PowerShell execution behavior relevant to this detection.
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.