Threat Group Cards: A Threat Actor Encyclopedia

APT group: SideWinder, Rattlesnake

Names	SideWinder (Kaspersky) Rattlesnake (Tencent) Razor Tiger (CrowdStrike) T-APT-04 (Tencent) APT-C-17 (Qihoo 360) Hardcore Nationalist (?) HN2 (?) APT-Q-39 (?) BabyElephant (?) GroupA21 (?)
Country	India
Motivation	Information theft and espionage
First seen	2012
Description	(Kaspersky) An actor mainly targeting Pakistan military targets, active since at least 2012. We have low confidence that this malware might be authored by an Indian company. To spread the malware, they use unique implementations to leverage the exploits of known vulnerabilities (such as CVE-2017-11882) and later deploy a Powershell payload in the final stages.
Observed	Sectors: Defense, Government. Countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Turkey.
Tools used	BroStealer, callCam, Capriccio RAT.
Operations performed	Mar 2019	First Active Attack Exploiting CVE-2019-2215 Found on Google Play, Linked to SideWinder APT Group <https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/first-active-attack-exploiting-cve-2019-2215-found-on-google-play-linked-to-sidewinder-apt-group/>
	Jun 2021	Old Snake, New Skin: Analysis of SideWinder APT activity between June and November 2021 <https://www.group-ib.com/resources/research-hub/sidewinder-apt/>
	Mar 2022	SideWinder’s malicious document, which also exploit the Russia-Ukraine conflict, was uploaded to VT in the middle of March. <https://research.checkpoint.com/2022/state-sponsored-attack-groups-capitalise-on-russia-ukraine-war-for-cyber-espionage/>
	May 2022	Group-IB Threat Intelligence researchers have discovered a new malicious infrastructure and a custom tool of the APT group SideWinder <https://blog.group-ib.com/sidewinder-antibot>
	Nov 2022	SideWinder Uses Server-side Polymorphism to Attack Pakistan Government Officials — and Is Now Targeting Turkey <https://blogs.blackberry.com/en/2023/05/sidewinder-uses-server-side-polymorphism-to-target-pakistan>
Information	<https://securelist.com/apt-trends-report-q1-2018/85280/> <https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/global/en/current-threats/pdfs/fireeye-sidewinder-targeted-attack.pdf> <https://medium.com/@Sebdraven/apt-sidewinder-tricks-powershell-anti-forensics-and-execution-side-loading-5bc1a7e7c84c> <https://s.tencent.com/research/report/479.html> <https://s.tencent.com/research/report/659.html> <https://cdn-cybersecurity.att.com/docs/global-perspective-of-the-sidewinder-apt.pdf> <https://thehackernews.com/2022/05/sidewinder-hackers-launched-over-1000.html> <https://www.neosecuretendencias2021.com/assets/pdfs/crowdstrike/2021%20Global%20Threat%20Report%20FINAL%20.pdf> <https://www.group-ib.com/blog/hunting-sidewinder/>
MITRE ATT&CK	<https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0121/>

Last change to this card: 21 June 2023

Download this actor card in PDF or JSON format

Previous: SideCopy
Next: Siesta