Operation Digital Eye was conducted in June and July of 2024 by suspected People's Republic of China (PRC)-nexus threat actors targeting business-to-business IT service providers in Southern Europe. Operation Digital Eye activity included the use of Visual Studio Code tunnels for command and control (C2) and custom lateral movement capabilities. Overlaps in tooling between Digital Eye and previous China-nexus campaigns, Operation Soft Cell and Operation Tainted Love, indicate the potential use of shared vendors or digital quartermasters.[1]
22
Techniques64th pct
11
TacticsTop 23%
4
Tools & malware71st pct
0
Threat groupsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
During Operation Digital Eye, threat actors attempted to make filenames appear legitimate by tailoring them to the victim organization.7
Stealth30 detection rules
Standing C0061
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
Techniques2264th pct
64th percentile · 64% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics11Top 23%
77th percentile · 77% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many tactics spanned or fewer.
Tools & malware471st pct
71st percentile · 71% 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 / technique30medTop 11%
89th percentile · 89% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have this many detection rules per technique or fewer.
Tests / technique5.5medTop 7%
93rd percentile · 93% 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 / technique1.5med45th pct
45th percentile · 55% of 56 ATT&CK campaigns have more mitigations per technique.
6 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this campaign’s 22 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
The following analytic identifies access to the /api/v1/configuration/users/user-roles/user-role/rest-userrole1/web/web-bookmarks/bookmark endpoint, which is associated with CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887 vulnerabilities. (...)
The following analytic detects potential exploitation of the Adobe ColdFusion vulnerability, CVE-2023-26360, which allows unauthenticated arbitrary file read. (...)
Tobias Michalski (Nextron Systems), Max Altgelt (Nextron Systems)
2021-09-20
2023-01-02
6702b13c-e421-44cc-ab33-42cc25570f11
Splunk
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 execution of tools commonly exploited by cybercriminals, such as those used for unauthorized access, network scanning, privilege escalation, password dumping or data exfiltration. (...)
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 the execution of the "whoami" command with the "/group" flag, where the results are passed to the "find" command in order to look for a the string "12288". (...)
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. (...)