- 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.
Western sources
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
- ETDA Threat Group Card apt.etda.or.th
- Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de