Credential phishing at scale against Gulf government and academic mail.
Also tracked as Newscaster Team · Magic Hound · G0059 · Phosphorus · Mint Sandstorm · TunnelVision · COBALT MIRAGE · Agent Serpens · RICH ION · PHOSPHORUS · CHARMING KITTEN · Parastoo
Summary
APT35 is a threat actor attributed to State-sponsored, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), assessed as information theft and espionage-motivated. Its recorded targeting runs to defense, education, energy, financial and adjacent sectors across 22 countries in the open reporting we hold — Kuwait, Saudi Arabia among them.
Across 78 attributed ATT&CK techniques we resolve 19 distinct behaviours — the things they do that a detection can be written against. The two that account for most of their observed tradecraft are discovery command burst on one host and valid account abuse or account creation. Their toolkit is 13 named items: 3 we see only in this actor's reporting and 10 commodity or dual-use. That ratio is the point — the first group is what identifies them, the second is what they share with every other group and with red teams.
For a Gulf defender the relevant line is the victimology: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia appear in the reporting behind this record. That is evidence of past targeting, not a forecast, and it is drawn from what vendors chose to publish — an actor working quietly in a market nobody reports on looks identical to one that is absent.
As MITRE describes them: “FireEye has identified APT35 operations dating back to 2014. APT35, also known as the Newscaster Team, is a threat group sponsored by the Iranian government that conducts long term, resource-intensive operations to collect strategic intelligence. APT35 typically targets U.S. and the Middle Eastern military, diplomatic and government personnel, organizations in the media, energy and defense industrial base (DIB), and engineering, business services and telecommunications sectors.” — MITRE ATT&CK, CC BY 4.0.
On the name. “APT35” labels a cluster of related activity tracked under one name — not a verified organisation. Whether one team, several contractors or a rotating cast sits behind it is not something this record establishes, and the vendor names below are separate groupings that only mostly overlap.
02 — The detection plan
Most actor profiles hand you indicators that expire in days. These are the behaviours the actor cannot drop without changing how they operate, each with the reason it holds. Weight is our own: how much of the actor's observed tradecraft the behaviour accounts for.
The persistence mechanism and the directory it points at both outlive the payload. The discriminator is the TARGET PATH, not the task or key name, which the actor can change freely.
8 techniques · weight 5
Few legitimate processes read LSASS memory, so precision is high in most estates once the agents that do are excluded.
2 techniques · weight 5
A script file appearing under a web root outside a deployment window is close to a binary signal, and it catches the entry vector rather than the aftermath.
2 techniques · weight 5
The delivery wrapper changes constantly; an office, archive or browser process parenting a shell is the same shape across all of them.
8 techniques · weight 5
Nothing legitimate disables the estate's own defences at endpoint scale, and the action reliably precedes the part of the intrusion you care about.
9 techniques · weight 5
Shadow-copy deletion and service stops precede the encryption by minutes — that window is the only one where a detection still changes the outcome.
8 techniques · weight 5
Defeats egress-domain control outright — the destination is a platform the estate already permits, so no blocklist and no TLD heuristic will see it.
7 techniques · weight 4
Kept separate from the LSASS rule because it needs different telemetry and tunes differently — a browser credential store read by a non-browser process is its own signal.
8 techniques · weight 4
Encodes the naming RULE rather than the filenames, so it survives every rename. The convention is a habit; the names are inventory.
6 techniques · weight 4
The command-line SHAPE — the flag combination, not the payload — is stable for months to years and cheap to match.
8 techniques · weight 4
Chosen to avoid a shell, so command-line rules miss it entirely. The broker is a stable choice; what it runs is not.
6 techniques · weight 4
The set of system binaries that can fetch a file is small and changes with the OS, not with the actor.
5 techniques · weight 3
Lateral movement leaves a service-creation or admin-share write that is the same regardless of the tool that made it.
6 techniques · weight 3
Staging is a step the actor cannot skip, and it happens before the data leaves — the last cheap place to catch it.
7 techniques · weight 3
Not a durable behavioural signature but the entry vector for a large public estate — worth an exposure control even where the detection is weak.
3 techniques · weight 3
The tunneller is a tool choice that persists for months, and the traffic shape is visible even when the payload is not.
8 techniques · weight 3
Produces no malware event at all — the only trace is in identity telemetry, which is why an endpoint-only programme has a blind spot exactly here.
10 techniques · weight 3
The URI shape and cadence are cheap to match and hold for weeks to months — but the destination itself rotates in days, so match the pattern rather than the host.
7 techniques · weight 3
No single discovery command is worth an alert. The DENSITY is — several distinct recon binaries on one host inside an hour is a shape ordinary use does not produce.
17 techniques · weight 2
No single behaviour here is worth waking someone. Summed weights of 6 on one host inside a window is an alert; 10 is an incident. The pair that most reliably means this actor rather than commodity crime is Persistence pointing into world-writable staging + Credential access against LSASS — seen together, treat as an incident regardless of total.
03 — Tooling
Purpose is derived, not asserted: each tool's own ATT&CK techniques are resolved to tactics, and the tactics it spends most of its techniques in are what it is for.
Actor-specific means we have no record of it outside this actor's reporting — those are the names that identify them. Commodity covers everything sold, published or shared: Cobalt Strike and Brute Ratel are licensed red-team software every pentester owns, Mimikatz and Impacket are public, and backdoors like ShadowPad circulate between unrelated groups. Finding a commodity tool tells you far less, which is exactly why the split is drawn. ATT&CK's own “malware vs tool” type answers a different question — whether the software is malicious — so it is not used for this.
Actor-specific — 3 items
Gathering data and moving data out.
Gathering data and remote control.
Staying resident and network reconnaissance.
Commodity and dual-use — 10 items
Credential theft and gathering data.
Credential theft and moving between hosts.
Staying resident and moving between hosts.
Credential theft and moving between hosts.
Remote control and network reconnaissance.
Moving between hosts and staying resident.
Privilege escalation and remote control.
We hold none. Our corpus carries 9,780 hashes, but they come from live feeds covering current commodity campaigns — not the decade-old actor-specific backdoors in the list above. ATT&CK itself publishes no sample hashes; it is a technique knowledge base. Where a sample would have to come from a third party’s family tag rather than from this actor’s reporting, we leave the row empty instead of implying an attribution we cannot support.
04 — Coverage, honestly counted
Of the techniques attributed to APT35, 55 fold into the detection plan above, 15 describe preparation you cannot see from inside your network, and 8 are uncatalogued — we have not yet placed them. That last number is published on purpose; it is the honest size of the gap.
05 — The chain
The same techniques as above, sequenced. Useful for deciding where to spend a detection: the earlier a tactic sits, the more of the intrusion you still get to prevent.
06 — Tradecraft artefacts
Pulled from primary vendor research and kept attributed. These are hunt starting points, not detections — a path an actor used once is worth a query, not a rule.
| Artefact | Kind | First reported by | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| %temp%\thinking_robot_log.txt | file path | The Hacker News | 2025-11-05 |
07 — Sourcing, graded
NATO Admiralty grading. The letter is the source's reliability, the number the credibility of the claim. We separate primary vendor research from outlets reporting on it, because ten articles derived from one report is one report.
| Grade | Source | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| B2 | MITRE actor record | 62 references across 32 distinct research hosts |
| C3 | Cloudsek | 9 items — reporting on other vendors' research |
| C3 | The Hacker News | 5 items — reporting on other vendors' research |
| B2 | Recorded Future | 2 items — primary vendor research |
| C3 | Dark Reading | 1 item — reporting on other vendors' research |
| B2 | Check Point | 1 item — primary vendor research |
| C3 | SecurityWeek | 1 item — reporting on other vendors' research |
| — | Estate telemetry | no data — absent, not negative |
20 items · 7 outlets · 45% of reporting traces to a single outlet
08 — What we do not know
Every vendor profile has these. Most omit them, which leaves you unable to tell a quiet actor from an unobserved one.
No URI paths, headers or beacon sequences for any family we hold, and no URL indicators at all to derive them from — the indicator set is hashes, hosts and addresses.
No domains are attributed to this actor in our holdings, so no naming convention, TLD preference or hosting pattern can be derived.
09 — Outlook
Probability language is ICD 203. Likelihood and confidence are stated separately: how likely we think it is, and how good our basis is for thinking so.
11 — Related actors
Ranked by shared victimology first, shared attribution second. The reason is on each card.
Travel, telecom and personal-movement data across Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
VPN and edge-appliance exploitation into Kuwaiti and Saudi networks.
The Gulf energy and telecom operator-set, worked continuously for a decade.
10 — Primary sources
62 of them. Published in full so the page can be checked rather than believed.
Run it against your own estate
The library is the part we can publish. The platform runs the same detection plan against your own estate, tells you which of these behaviours you already cover, and retro-hunts the rest — on your hardware, with nothing leaving the building.