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APT42 is an Iranian state-sponsored cyberespionage group active since at least 2015 that conducts intelligence collection and surveillance against individuals and organizations of strategic interest to Iran. Tracking names include CALANQUE, COBALT ILLUSION, Educated Manticore, TA453, and Yellow Garuda; its activity has also been reported under the broader Charming Kitten label. Its targets include government officials, diplomats, defense personnel, policy researchers, journalists, academics, healthcare organizations, legal services, nongovernmental organizations, human rights defenders, and Iranian opposition and diaspora communities, particularly in Western countries and the Middle East. APT42 specializes in patient, relationship-based social engineering. Operators impersonate journalists, researchers, think-tank personnel, and event organizers, often cultivating trust over days or weeks through email, social media, and messaging services. Interview requests, conference invitations, and shared documents lead to credential-harvesting pages or malware delivery. Its phishing infrastructure imitates trusted institutions and cloud services, and its credential-harvesting operations capture passwords and authentication codes to defeat some non-hardware multifactor authentication methods. Generative AI supports target reconnaissance, translation, persona development, tailored lures, and tool development. After compromise, APT42 collects email, cloud storage, contacts, calendars, and other sensitive information, including through legitimate account-export and synchronization features. Some operations remain predominantly within cloud environments. Its malware includes NICECURL, TAMECAT, and NokNok. NICECURL and TAMECAT support command execution, additional payload delivery, collection, and exfiltration; TAMECAT also steals browser credentials and cookies, collects mailbox data, and captures screenshots. Delivery chains have abused Windows search functionality and WebDAV to expose malicious shortcuts disguised as documents. APT42 also deploys mobile surveillance malware capable of tracking location, recording calls, and collecting messages and media. Defense-evasion practices include obfuscation, artifact deletion, security-software discovery, and abuse of legitimate tools and services.
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.
74 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
27 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
22 additional families tracked in Mallory.
2 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 2 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.
Recently Exploited Vulnerabilities by APT 42 CVE-2023-38831
406 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.
Conducted AI-assisted reconnaissance and spear-phishing, using Gemini and OSINT tooling to profile defense experts and target organizations and generate highly contextualized phishing content designed to evade NLP-based filters.
Using TAMECAT to collect browser credentials, cookies, and Windows/WebDAV-related data.
Iranian intelligence-collection threat actor conducting spear-phishing campaigns against individuals associated with the nuclear energy sector, using TAMECAT for surveillance, collection, and resilient command-and-control.
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.