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MuddyWater is an Iranian state-linked cyber-espionage threat actor associated with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). It is also tracked as MERCURY, Mango Sandstorm, Seedworm, Static Kitten, Earth Vetala, Yellow Nix, Boggy Serpens, TA450, TEMP.Zagros, and G0069. The group has targeted government-related organizations and organizations in the telecommunications, oil and gas, financial, healthcare, and software sectors, principally in the Middle East and North Africa, with observed activity also affecting U.S. and Canadian entities. MuddyWater commonly relies on spearphishing and exploitation of publicly exposed enterprise software for initial access, including participation in 2023 exploitation of PaperCut vulnerabilities. Operators conduct credential discovery in hybrid environments to expand access into cloud infrastructure. The group has also abused legitimate remote-monitoring and management tools for intrusion operations. In 2026, MuddyWater-attributed intrusions deployed the Dindoor backdoor after spearphishing. Dindoor abuses the legitimate Deno runtime to execute encoded script payloads, performs host and graphics-adapter discovery to identify virtualized analysis environments, communicates with remote infrastructure, and establishes user-level persistence through script-based execution at logon. MuddyWater malware has also supported screenshot capture and transfer of additional files. Its operations are primarily assessed to support Iranian intelligence collection.
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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.
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.
59 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
54 additional families tracked in Mallory.
34 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 34 of them exploited in the wild.
The government agencies recently observed MuddyWater exploiting the Microsoft Netlogon elevation of privilege vulnerability CVE-2020-1472 and the Microsoft Exchange memory corruption vulnerability CVE-2020-0688.
MuddyWater has been observed conducting a broad reconnaissance campaign across more than 12,000 internet-exposed systems by exploiting known security flaws in internet-exposed ... Langflow ... systems. The list of exploited vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2025-34291 - Langflow remote code execution vulnerability
Clearsky has detected new and advanced attack vector used by MuddyWater to target governmental entities and the telecommunication sector. Notably, the TTP includes decoy documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 as the first stage of the attack... Attack Vector 2 – CVE-2017-0199 ... MuddyWater has not used this TTP previously.
CVEs Weaponized by This Cluster CVE-2025-54068 — Laravel Livewire v3 RCE
Recently, Microsoft revealed that MuddyWater had been leveraging the ZeroLogon vulnerability as well (CVE-2020-1472)... CVE-2020-1472 - An elevation of privilege vulnerability that exists when an attacker establishes a vulnerable Netlogon secure channel connection to a domain controller, using the Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC).
29 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
1,102 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.
Iranian state-backed activity linked to exploitation of PaperCut vulnerabilities in 2023, including abuse of the Print Archiving feature.
Iranian state-backed group that participated in 2023 PaperCut exploitation and abused the Print Archiving feature to save documents sent through compromised print servers.
Iranian, MOIS-linked threat actor assessed as potentially having received training from Ravin Academy; responsible for attacks against government, financial, and healthcare organizations in the MENA region.
Mentioned only as a speculative comparison regarding possible use of COM-object or WMI-event-subscription persistence.
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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.