APT28 Nearest Neighbor Campaign was conducted by APT28 from early February 2022 to November 2024 against organizations and individuals with expertise on Ukraine. APT28 primarily leveraged living-off-the-land techniques, while leveraging the zero-day exploitation of CVE-2022-38028. Notably, APT28 leveraged Wi-Fi networks in close proximity to the intended target to gain initial access to the victim environment. By daisy-chaining multiple compromised organizations nearby the intended target, APT28 discovered dual-homed systems (with both a wired and wireless network connection) to enable Wi-Fi and use compromised credentials to connect to the victim network.[1]
18
Techniques54th pct
12
TacticsTop 14%
2
Tools & malware63rd pct
1
Threat groupunranked
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
During APT28 Nearest Neighbor Campaign, APT28 used the following commands to dump SAM, SYSTEM, and SECURITY hives: reg save hklm\sam, reg save hklm\system, and reg save hklm\security.2
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
Techniques1854th pct
54th percentile · 54% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics12Top 14%
86th percentile · 86% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many tactics spanned or fewer.
Tools & malware263rd pct
63rd percentile · 63% 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 / technique22med70th pct
70th percentile · 70% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many detection rules per technique or fewer.
Tests / technique3.5med71st pct
71st percentile · 71% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many atomic tests per technique or fewer.
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 18 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
The following analytic detects suspicious modifications to firewall rule registry settings that allow inbound traffic on specific ports with a public profile. (...)
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 assignment of high-risk Graph API permissions in Azure AD, specifically Application.ReadWrite.All, AppRoleAssignment.ReadWrite.All, and RoleManagement.ReadWrite.Directory. (...)
The following analytic identifies a single source IP failing to authenticate with multiple valid users, potentially indicating a Password Spraying attack against an Azure Active Directory tenant. (...)
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 potential reverse shell activity by identifying connections involving ports commonly associated with remote access tools, shell listeners, or tunneling utilities. (...)
The following analytic detects the use of `cmd.exe /c` to execute commands, a technique often employed by adversaries and malware to run batch commands or invoke other shells like PowerShell. (...)
The following analytic identifies the use of named-pipe impersonation for privilege escalation, commonly associated with Cobalt Strike and similar frameworks. (...)