GINC-APT-0249 · State

TeamSpy Crew

Also Anger Bear, Iron Lyric, SIG39, Team Bear, TeamSpy.

Category
State · Attributed to a state or working for one.
Origin
Russia(high confidence)
Sponsor
Russian Federation
Motivation
Espionage; Information theft and espionage
Seen
2010
Sources
7 sources carry it
Identifier
GINC-APT-0249 · teamspy-crew

What it is

Researchers have uncovered a long-term cyber-espionage campaign that used a combination of legitimate software packages and commodity malware tools to target a variety of heavy industry, government intelligence agencies and political activists. Known as the TeamSpy crew because of its affinity for using the legitimate TeamViewer application as part of its toolset, the attackers may have been active for as long as 10 years, researchers say. The attack appears to be a years-long espionage campaign, but experts who have analyzed the victim profile, malware components and command-and-control infrastructure say that it’s not entirely clear what kind of data the attackers are going after. What is clear, though, is that the attackers have been at this for a long time and that they have specific people in mind as targets. Researchers at the CrySyS Lab in Hungary were alerted by the Hungarian National Security Authority to an attack against a high-profile target in the country and began looking into the campaign. They quickly discovered that some of the infrastructure being used in the attack had been in use for some time and that the target they were investigating was by no means the only one.

Names

The names each vendor, agency and source gives it. Naming differs by who tracks the actor, so one group carries many.

CrowdStrike
Anger Bear, Team Bear
NSA leak
SIG39
Other names
Iron Lyric, TeamSpy

Attribution

Each attribution is a claim: who makes it, and to whom. Western and Eastern sources are kept apart, as they often disagree.

Targets

Countries
Algeria, Australia, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bhutan, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Central-African Republic, Chad, China, Congo, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Djibouti, Egypt, France, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam
Sectors
Activists, Education, Government, Government, Administration, Industrial, Intelligence, Private sector

Tools

The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.

  • Archelaus Beta
  • Cyber Eye RAT
  • CyberGate
  • JAVA RATs
  • Malicious TeamViewer versions
  • TeamSpy
  • TeamViewer
  • Xpert

Sources