Operation Ghost was an APT29 campaign starting in 2013 that included operations against ministries of foreign affairs in Europe and the Washington, D.C. embassy of a European Union country. During Operation Ghost, APT29 used new families of malware and leveraged web services, steganography, and unique C2 infrastructure for each victim.[1]
8
TechniquesBottom 21%
6
Tactics34th pct
5
Tools & malwareTop 21%
1
Threat groupunranked
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
For Operation Ghost, APT29 registered domains for use in C2 including some crafted to appear as existing legitimate domains.7
Resource Developmentno detection rules
Standing C0023
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
Techniques8Bottom 21%
21st percentile · 79% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more Enterprise techniques.
Tactics634th pct
34th percentile · 66% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more tactics spanned.
Tools & malware5Top 21%
79th percentile · 79% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many tools and malware or fewer.
Threat group155% 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 / technique5.5medBottom 13%
13th percentile · 87% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique0med
Operation Ghost detections C0023
52 distinct rules cover the 8 techniques recorded for this campaign. 39 Sigma · 13 Splunk.
5 covered by at least one rule3 with no coverage52 distinct rules in total
Showing 1-50 of 52 rules
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MITRE ATT&CK
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Detect remote login by Administrator user (depending on internal pattern).
Detects Formbook like process executions that inject code into a set of files in the System32 folder, which executes a special command command line to delete the dropper from the AppData Temp folder. (...)
Detects modifications to the msDS-ManagedAccountPrecededByLink attribute, which may indicate an attempted or successful abuse of the BaD-Successor msDS-DelegatedManagedServiceAccount (DMSA) vulnerability. (...)
Detects the creation of new msDS-DelegatedManagedServiceAccount objects, which could indicate potential abuse of privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Windows Server 2025. (...)
Adversaries may establish persistence and elevate privileges by executing malicious content triggered by a Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) event subscription.
The following analytic detects suspicious Kerberos Service Ticket (TGS) requests where the requesting account name matches the service name, potentially indicating an exploitation attempt of CVE-2021-42278 and CVE-2021-42287. (...)
The following analytic detects suspicious Kerberos Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT) requests that may indicate exploitation of CVE-2021-42278 and CVE-2021-42287. (...)
frack113, Christopher Peacock '@securepeacock', SCYTHE '@scythe_io'
2021-10-25
2023-05-05
8468111a-ef07-4654-903b-b863a80bbc95
Splunk
The following analytic detects a user account modifying its own userPrincipalName (UPN) to match the sAMAccountName of another account via Windows Security Event 4738. (...)
The following analytic detects the execution of a DNS query by a process to the associated Telegram API domain, which could indicate access via a Telegram bot commonly used by malware for command and control (C2) communications. (...)
The following analytic detects the execution of MOFComp.exe loading a MOF file, often triggered by cmd.exe or powershell.exe, or from unusual paths like User Profile directories. (...)
The following analytic detects the execution of PowerView PowerShell cmdlets `Get-ObjectAcl` or `Get-DomainObjectAcl`, which are used to enumerate Access Control List (ACL) permissions for Active Directory objects. (...)
Detects signs of the WMI script host process "scrcons.exe" loading scripting DLLs which could indicates WMI ActiveScriptEventConsumers EventConsumers activity.