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Machete, also known as El Machete, APT-C-43, and Machete APT, is a Spanish-speaking cyberespionage threat actor focused primarily on Latin America. The group is best known for long-running operations against Venezuelan government entities and the Ecuadorean military, with additional activity reported against financial organizations in Nicaragua and against financial institutions in the Middle East. Its operations are consistent with espionage rather than financially motivated crime. Machete commonly gains initial access through highly tailored spearphishing emails carrying compressed malicious attachments or links to archives. The lures often use victim-specific themes and, in some campaigns, reused legitimate documents previously stolen from targets. The group has relied on user execution of malicious attachments and has embedded malicious macros in lure documents to trigger follow-on payload delivery. It has also used batch scripts and command-shell execution to download and launch additional components. The group’s malware ecosystem has prominently included Python-based tooling, including multi-component backdoors and loaders packaged in self-extracting archives. Machete has used obfuscation layers to hinder analysis and has disguised payloads and installers as legitimate software such as Adobe Reader, Google Chrome, Java, Dropbox, and Python components. Persistence has been maintained through Windows Scheduled Tasks, including recurring task-based execution of malware components. Machete’s collection capabilities include theft of confidential documents, screenshots, keystrokes, clipboard contents, browser data, geolocation-related information, and files from removable media. Reported tooling has supported credential theft from browsers, keylogging, file upload and download, command execution, and selective retrieval of victim files. The actor has also demonstrated exfiltration of stolen data to hidden folders on removable drives, suggesting an ability to support collection in environments with limited connectivity or with operator proximity. Large-scale document theft from Venezuelan government organizations has been a defining feature of the group’s activity.
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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.
Geographies tied to known operations.
38 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
2 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
1 CVE this actor has used in observed campaigns. 1 of them exploited in the wild.
35 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 detection annotations for Ghostscript exploitation; no specific campaign activity is described in this reference.
Listed as a threat actor associated with the malicious file execution technique detected by this analytic.
Listed as a threat actor associated with Windows Command Shell execution behavior relevant to this detection.
Listed in the detection annotations as a threat actor associated with EFI volume mounting / installation-related behavior.
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.