Loading threat actor…
Ember Bear is a Russian state-linked threat actor associated with Russia's military intelligence service, the GRU, and Unit 29155. Its aliases include FrozenVista, Bleeding Bear, Cadet Blizzard, DEV-0586, Lorec53, Saint Bear, Storm-0587, TA471, UAC-0056, and UNC2589. Its operations include document theft and destructive attacks against Ukrainian organizations, particularly government institutions. CERT-UA has tracked activity under the UAC-0056 designation since at least April 2021. The actor uses phishing and government-service impersonation to deliver malicious archives containing lure documents and shortcuts. Executing the shortcuts launches PowerShell to download OutSteel, an AutoIt-based document stealer that exfiltrates selected files through HTTP POST requests and subsequently downloads and executes SaintBot. Other tooling associated with UAC-0056 includes Pandora hVNC, RemoteUtilities, GrimPlant, and GraphSteel. Ember Bear has obtained malware and related tools from dark-web forums, extracted plaintext credentials from compromised IP-camera configurations, and used Rclone to exfiltrate data to MEGA. In January 2022, DEV-0586 deployed WhisperGate against multiple Ukrainian organizations. WhisperGate is destructive malware masquerading as ransomware rather than a conventional financially motivated encryption operation. It overwrites the master boot record and corrupts files on local and attached storage. Its execution chain abuses legitimate Windows utilities, downloads additional payloads through Discord's content delivery infrastructure, and impairs Microsoft Defender through exclusions, service termination, and deletion of security components.
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.
62 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
22 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
17 additional families tracked in Mallory.
19 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 19 of them exploited in the wild.
...has exploited Office vulnerabilities such as CVE-2017-11882...
BlackByte exploited vulnerabilities such as ProxyLogon and ProxyShell for initial access... Magic Hound has exploited ... on-premises MS Exchange servers via "ProxyShell" (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207)... Ember Bear ... CVE-2022-41040, ProxyShell, and other vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange.
Ember Bear ... CVE-2022-41040 ... in Microsoft Exchange... Play ... CVE-2022-41082 and CVE-2022-41040 ("ProxyNotShell") in Microsoft Exchange.
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.
Ember Bear has used exploits for vulnerabilities such as MS17-010, also known as Eternal Blue, during operations.
14 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
368 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.
A named activity cluster cited as having TTP overlap with Operation Talked; the content does not assert that it is definitively the same actor.
Annotation-only mention; no actor-specific operation or behavior is described.
Saint Bear is listed in the detection's annotations.
Referenced only as an annotated actor associated with the detection technique.
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.