Between November 26, 2015, and December 1, 2015, known and suspected China-based APT groups launched several spear-phishing attacks targeting Japanese and Taiwanese organizations in the high-tech, government services, media and financial services industries. Each campaign delivered a malicious Microsoft Word document exploiting the aforementioned EPS dict copy use-after-free vulnerability, and the local Windows privilege escalation vulnerability CVE-2015-1701. The successful exploitation of both vulnerabilities led to the delivery of either a downloader that we refer to as IRONHALO, or a backdoor that we refer to as ELMER.
The same group is tracked under different names by different vendors.
| Vendor | Name |
|---|---|
| OSINT | SVCMONDR |
| OSINT | G0023 |
Sectors: Private sector
Victim countries: Japan, Taiwan
No IOCs extracted yet from reports naming this actor.
Every report in the Global Intel Library that names APT16, newest first. Open any report to see the full analysis with provenance.
No reports in the Lore library name this actor yet.
Indicators from free threat feeds (abuse.ch ThreatFox, AlienVault OTX) attributed to APT16. Each row shows why it was linked and where it came from.
No feed indicators linked to this actor yet. Feeds are checked every hour.
Open-source reports about this actor collected from MISP Galaxy and MITRE ATT&CK.