C0021 was a spearphishing campaign conducted in November 2018 that targeted public sector institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), educational institutions, and private-sector corporations in the oil and gas, chemical, and hospitality industries. The majority of targets were located in the US, particularly in and around Washington D.C., with other targets located in Europe, Hong Kong, India, and Canada. C0021's technical artifacts, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and targeting overlap with previous suspected APT29 activity.[1][2]
15
Techniques41st pct
5
TacticsBottom 25%
1
Tool or malware45th pct
0
Threat groupsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
During C0021, the threat actors downloaded additional tools and files onto victim machines.1011
Command and Control131 detection rules
Standing C0021
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
Techniques1541st pct
41st percentile · 59% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more Enterprise techniques.
Tactics5Bottom 25%
25th percentile · 75% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more tactics spanned.
Tool or malware145th pct
45th percentile · 55% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more tools and malware.
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 / technique12med41st pct
41st percentile · 59% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique0medBottom 23%
23rd percentile · 77% 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 / technique2medTop 16%
84th percentile · 84% 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 15 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.
Detects the Linux-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency by Axios NPM package, including payload download via curl and detached execution using nohup and python3. (...)
Detects the macOS-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency in Axios NPM Package, including AppleScript execution via osascript, payload download, permission modification, execution, and cleanup.
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. (...)
Adversaries may communicate using application layer protocols associated with web traffic to avoid detection/network filtering by blending in with existing traffic. (...)
This analytic detects the usage of the Utility osascript on a macOS device initiated a network connection lasting longer than 10 minutes (600 seconds). (...)
This analytic detects unexpected outbound network connections initiated by known webserver processes such as `httpd.exe`, `nginx.exe`, or `tomcat.exe` to common file sharing or public content hosting services like GitHub, Discord CDN, Transfer.sh, or Pastebin. (...)
The following analytic detects the use of known suspicious SSL certificates in any observed event where the SSL_CertFingerprint field is present. (...)
The following analytic detects potential reverse shell activity by identifying connections involving ports commonly associated with remote access tools, shell listeners, or tunneling utilities. (...)
The following analytic detects connections with a high Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) threat confidence score, indicating potentially malicious behavior within encrypted traffic. (...)
This analytic identifies Snort intrusion signatures that have been triggered by ten or more distinct internal IP addresses within a one-hour window. (...)