During Operation Ghost, APT29 used steganography to hide the communications between the implants and their C&C servers.2
campaign
Operation Ghost C0023
- First seen
- September 2013
- Last seen
- October 2019
- Created
- 23 March 2023
- Last modified
- 31 July 2026
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.
MITRE reference C0023
During Operation Ghost, APT29 used steganography to hide payloads inside valid images.3
For Operation Ghost, APT29 used stolen administrator credentials for lateral movement on compromised networks.4
For Operation Ghost, APT29 used social media platforms to hide communications to C2 servers.5
During Operation Ghost, APT29 used WMI event subscriptions to establish persistence for malware.6
For Operation Ghost, APT29 registered domains for use in C2 including some crafted to appear as existing legitimate domains.7
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
Detection coverage C0023
51 distinct rules cover the 8 techniques recorded for this campaign. 39 Sigma · 12 Splunk.
5 covered by at least one rule3 with no coverage51 distinct rules in total
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