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MuddyWater is an Iranian state-sponsored cyberespionage group first observed in 2017 and publicly identified by U.S. Cyber Command as a subordinate element of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). It is also tracked as Seedworm, Mango Sandstorm, Mercury, Static Kitten, TEMP.Zagros, TA450, Earth Vetala, Cobalt Ulster, Boggy Serpens, ITG17, Yellow Nix, and ATK_51. Its operations focus primarily on the Middle East and Central Asia, targeting government, military, telecommunications, academic, and information technology organizations. Documented campaigns include attacks against entities in Turkey and Tajikistan. The group gains access through targeted spearphishing with malicious attachments and links, including messages sent from compromised third-party accounts. Its document-based attacks have combined exploitation of CVE-2017-0199 with malicious Office macros to deliver POWERSTATS. A March 2024 campaign used PDF attachments containing links to archives carrying Atera Agent installers. MuddyWater also abuses legitimate remote-access software, including ConnectWise and Remote Utilities, and has exploited Microsoft Exchange through CVE-2020-0688 and the Ruler framework. Other documented exploitation includes the Netlogon vulnerability CVE-2020-1472 and the Langflow vulnerability CVE-2025-3248. MuddyWater combines custom malware with publicly available offensive tools. Its toolset includes POWERSTATS, PowGoop downloader variants, the Mori backdoor, and custom reverse-shell tooling. It uses DLL side-loading, obfuscated PowerShell and VBScript, Base64 encoding, and Invoke-Obfuscation to conceal execution and command-and-control functionality. Mori communicates through DNS tunneling, while Chisel, SSF, and Ligolo support access to systems inside compromised networks. Persistence mechanisms include Registry Run entries and scheduled tasks. The group steals credentials with LaZagne, Mimikatz, and ProcDump, including passwords stored in email applications, and performs host reconnaissance such as process enumeration. Its operations demonstrate sustained refinement of custom tooling alongside continued reliance on legitimate administration software and open-source offensive utilities.
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.
68 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
57 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
52 additional families tracked in Mallory.
35 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 35 of them exploited in the wild.
Sentinel Labs tracked MuddyWater targeting Exchange servers of high-profile organizations using a publicly available script for exploiting CVE-2020-0688, a vulnerability that enables remote code execution for an authenticated user.
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.
Dragonfly has exploited a Windows Netlogon vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) to obtain access to Windows Active Directory servers. Earth Lusca, FIN7, menuPass, MuddyWater, and Wizard Spider are also associated with its exploitation or attempted exploitation.
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
PaperCut faced widespread exploitation in 2023 involving CVE-2023-27350, which attackers used to obtain unauthenticated administrative access and execute code.
30 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
1,149 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.
Mentioned only as a comparison for abuse of commercial cloud proxy services to conceal server addresses. The content does not connect MuddyWater to the UAC-0099 campaign.
Listed as an annotation to a renamed-Python-binary detection; no actor-specific campaign or behavior is described.
MuddyWater is listed in the detection's annotations.
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.