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Moonstone Sleet is a North Korea-attributed threat actor tracked by Microsoft under its Sleet naming family for DPRK-linked nation-state activity. The group has also been tracked as DEV-0530, Storm-1789, ML Sleet, and H0lyGh0st. Reporting has linked DEV-0530 and the H0lyGh0st ransomware operation to North Korean activity, with assessments noting connections to Andariel, indicating overlap between state-directed and financially motivated tradecraft. Moonstone Sleet is associated with both espionage-aligned and revenue-generating operations. The actor has been tied to cyber extortion and ransomware activity, including use of H0lyGh0st ransomware and, by 2025, deployment of Qilin ransomware in some intrusions. This places the group among DPRK operators that blend intelligence collection, access operations, and financially motivated attacks. Observed targeting and victimology indicate broad opportunistic and strategic behavior rather than a single narrow sector focus. The group has been associated with social-engineering-heavy intrusion chains, including spearphishing attachments, fake recruiter approaches, trojanized software, and malicious interview or job-themed lures resembling North Korean employment-themed campaigns such as Dream Job and DangerousPassword. Users have been induced to execute malicious files, including trojanized installers, to initiate compromise. Moonstone Sleet commonly relies on staged payload delivery and multi-stage infection chains. The actor has hosted or staged malicious capabilities online for follow-on retrieval by victims or first-stage malware. Delivery and execution have involved multiple rounds of obfuscation, encoding, and encrypted payloads to hinder analysis and evade defenses. Persistence has included use of Registry Run keys during initial infection. Post-compromise behavior includes host and network reconnaissance, such as system user discovery, victim system discovery, browser information collection, and network configuration discovery. The group has been observed gathering information on victim systems and network configuration, and deploying malware such as YouieLoader to collect browser-related data and perform user discovery. Additional payload retrieval has involved use of common command-line tooling such as curl to fetch second-stage components from actor-controlled infrastructure. Overall, Moonstone Sleet represents a DPRK-linked intrusion set that combines North Korean social-engineering tradecraft, staged malware delivery, defense evasion through obfuscation and encrypted payloads, reconnaissance on compromised hosts, and ransomware-enabled monetization. Known aliases include DEV-0530, H0lyGh0st, ML Sleet, and Storm-1789.
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.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
45 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
11 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
6 additional families tracked in Mallory.
4 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 4 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.
To gain initial access, new variants of H0lyGh0st ransomware search for vulnerabilities in the public-facing web applications and content management systems of their target. DotCMS RCE (CVE-2022-26352) vulnerability is one of the vulnerabilities exploited by the ransomware group.
This detection focuses on identifying vulnerable versions 18.12.407 and 18.12.416 of the 3CX desktop app... these specific versions have known vulnerabilities... CVE CVE-2023-29059
Google released an update and thanked us for discovering this attack... CVE-2024-4947... The exploit contains code for two vulnerabilities: the first is used to gain the ability to read and write Chrome process memory from the JavaScript... CVE-2024-4947 ... is the vulnerability in this new compiler.
50 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 a threat actor associated with the malicious file execution technique detected by this analytic.
Listed in the detection annotations as a threat actor associated with EFI volume mounting / installation-related behavior.
Listed as a threat actor associated with exploitation of public-facing applications and malware/tool upload activity relevant to Confluence exploitation detection.
Referenced as a threat actor associated with spearphishing attachment activity involving malicious file execution and potential credential capture via UDL files.
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.