- Category
- State · Attributed to a state or working for one.
- Origin
- Uzbekistan(medium confidence)contested
- Sponsor
- State-sponsored, Military Unit 02616
- Motivation
- Information theft and espionage
- Seen
- 2018
- Sources
- 8 sources carry it
- Identifier
- GINC-APT-0154 · sandcat
UzbekistanWhat it is
SandCat, on the other hand, is a group that was discovered more recently by Kaspersky. One of the Windows vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft in December had been exploited by both FruityArmor and SandCat in attacks targeting the Middle East and Africa. SandCat has been using FinFisher/FinSpy spyware and CHAINSHOT, a piece of malware analyzed earlier this year by Palo Alto Networks. The group has also used the CVE-2018-8589 and CVE-2018-8611 Windows vulnerabilities in its attacks, both of which had a zero-day status when Microsoft released fixes.
Names
The names each vendor, agency and source gives it. Naming differs by who tracks the actor, so one group carries many.
- Qihoo 360
- APT-C-32
- Other names
- SandCat - APT-C-32
Attribution
Each attribution is a claim: who makes it, and to whom. Western and Eastern sources are kept apart, as they often disagree.
Western sources
- ETDA / ThaiCERTUzbekistan
- ThreatActor.info (Malpedia et al.)Uzbekistan
Chinese and Russian sources
- Qihoo 360Israel
Targets
- Countries
- Saudi Arabia
Tools
The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.
- CHAINSHOT
- CVE-2018-8589
- FINSPY
- FinFisher
- FinFisher/FinSpy
- Windows Remote Desktop
- Xploit
- several 0-days
Sources
- ETDA Threat Group Card apt.etda.or.th
- Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de