The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team and McAfee Labs Malware Operations Group have discovered a new global campaign targeting nuclear, defense, energy, and financial companies, based on McAfee® Global Threat Intelligence. This campaign, Operation Sharpshooter, leverages an in-memory implant to download and retrieve a second-stage implant—which we call Rising Sun—for further exploitation. According to our analysis, the Rising Sun implant uses source code from the Lazarus Group’s 2015 backdoor Trojan Duuzer in a new framework to infiltrate these key industries. Operation Sharpshooter’s numerous technical links to the Lazarus Group seem too obvious to immediately draw the conclusion that they are responsible for the attacks, and instead indicate a potential for false flags. Our research focuses on how this actor operates, the global impact, and how to detect the attack. We shall leave attribution to the broader security community.
The same group is tracked under different names by different vendors.
| Vendor | Name |
|---|---|
| Various | Operation Sharpshooter |
No techniques mapped yet.
No IOCs extracted yet from reports naming this actor.
Every report in the Global Intel Library that names Operation Sharpshooter, 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 Operation Sharpshooter. 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.