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Mirage Kitten is an Iranian state-backed cyberespionage group active since at least 2022. It is also tracked as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, and Nimbus Manticore. The group conducts long-term intelligence-collection operations primarily against organizations in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Europe, including aerospace, aviation, defense, telecommunications, government, financial services, and technology-related targets. Mirage Kitten uses highly targeted social engineering for initial access, notably recruiter impersonation on professional and employment platforms, fraudulent technical assessments, and recruitment-themed phishing. It has also used lookalike videoconferencing services to distribute malicious archives. Recent activity targeted software developers with trojanized coding challenges containing NodeRabbit and PollCat, cross-platform Node.js and JavaScript remote-access trojans. These implants support host and network discovery, process and filesystem operations, command execution, file transfer, system inventory collection, and encrypted web-based command-and-control. NodeRabbit variants include anti-analysis checks, enterprise proxy handling, Outlook artifact discovery, and persistence through counterfeit Visual Studio Code extensions and Git hooks. PollCat supports platform-specific persistence mechanisms and can execute attacker-provided JavaScript and hidden processes. The group has also deployed NightLedger, a Windows backdoor that uses DLL search-order hijacking and supports reconnaissance, command execution, file operations, screenshot capture, process management, and collection of diagnostic data. BridgeHead and ArcBridge are WebSocket-based tunneling utilities used during post-exploitation to relay operator traffic through compromised networks; BridgeHead supports SOCKS5-style tunneling and enterprise proxy authentication. Mirage Kitten tailors some tooling to individual victims through execution restrictions and uses cloud-hosted and Cloudflare-backed infrastructure to blend command-and-control traffic with legitimate services.
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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.
40 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
10 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
5 additional families tracked in Mallory.
157 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
11 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Conducting recruitment-themed social-engineering attacks against software developers. The group uses fake LinkedIn recruiter personas and malicious coding challenges to deliver cross-platform remote-access trojans, enabling reconnaissance, command execution, file manipulation, persistence, and access to developer source code, repositories, credentials, and corporate services.
Iran-linked cyberespionage actor targeting software engineers at fintech, aviation, and aerospace organizations through fraudulent recruitment offers and trojanized coding assessments. The group uses cross-platform Node.js/JavaScript RATs and persists through developer workflows, including malicious Visual Studio Code extensions and Git hooks.
Conducting cyberespionage against fintech and aviation organizations in the Middle East and Africa by impersonating recruiters on LinkedIn and delivering trojanized coding assessments.
Conducting cyberespionage against aviation, aerospace, and financial-technology specialists in Africa and the Middle East through fake recruiter outreach and job assessments on LinkedIn and other employment platforms.
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.