Operation Dust Storm was a long-standing persistent cyber espionage campaign that targeted multiple industries in Japan, South Korea, the United States, Europe, and several Southeast Asian countries. By 2015, the Operation Dust Storm threat actors shifted from government and defense-related intelligence targets to Japanese companies or Japanese subdivisions of larger foreign organizations supporting Japan's critical infrastructure, including electricity generation, oil and natural gas, finance, transportation, and construction.[1]
Operation Dust Storm threat actors also began to use Android backdoors in their operations by 2015, with all identified victims at the time residing in Japan or South Korea.[2]
17
Techniques50th pct
6
Tactics34th pct
6
Tools & malwareTop 12%
0
Threat groupsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
During Operation Dust Storm, the threat actors encoded some payloads with a single-byte XOR, both skipping the key itself and zeroing in an attempt to avoid exposing the key; other payloads were Base64-encoded.4
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this campaign touches. Coverage is how well defended each thing it does is, as a median per technique rather than a total — a total would just restate the reach. Each figure is ranked against all 56 ATT&CK campaigns only where that population actually spreads. Where most of the population shares one value, a percentile would rank the tie instead of the entity, so the raw value is shown and no rank is claimed.
Reach
Techniques1750th pct
50th percentile · 50% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more Enterprise techniques.
Tactics634th pct
34th percentile · 66% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more tactics spanned.
Tools & malware6Top 12%
88th percentile · 88% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many tools and malware or fewer.
Threat groups055% tie · 3 values
55% of the population shares a single value across only 3 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique13med52nd pct
52nd percentile · 52% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many detection rules per technique or fewer.
Tests / technique2med45th pct
45th percentile · 55% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more atomic tests per technique.
Data comps / technique4med43% tie · 7 values
43% of the population shares a single value across only 7 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Mitigations / technique3medTop 4%
96th percentile · 96% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many mitigations per technique or fewer.
6 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this campaign’s 17 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
Detects when AppLocker "Audit only" enforcement mode reports that an Application, DLL, Script, MSI, or Packaged-App would have been blocked if AppLocker "Enforce rules" enforcement mode was enabled.
The following analytic detects the creation of a batch file (.bat) within the Windows system directory tree, specifically in the System32 or SysWOW64 folders. (...)
The following analytic detects the use of CertUtil.exe with the 'decode' argument, which may indicate an attempt to decode a previously encoded file, potentially containing malicious payloads. (...)
The following analytic detects file downloads involving executable, archive, or scripting-related file types that are commonly used in malware delivery. (...)
Detects exploitation attempt of CVE-2023-38331 (WinRAR before v6.23), where an attacker can leverage WinRAR to execute arbitrary commands and binaries.
Adversaries may attempt to enumerate software for a variety of reasons, such as figuring out what security measures are present or if the compromised system has a version of software that is vulnerable.
Adversaries may attempt to enumerate software for a variety of reasons, such as figuring out what security measures are present or if the compromised system has a version of software that is vulnerable.