Ember Bear is a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group that has been active since at least 2020, linked to Russia's General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 161st Specialist Training Center (Unit 29155).[1]Ember Bear has primarily focused operations against Ukrainian government and telecommunication entities, but has also operated against critical infrastructure entities in Europe and the Americas.[2]Ember Bear conducted the WhisperGate destructive wiper attacks against Ukraine in early 2022.[3][4][1] There is some confusion as to whether Ember Bear overlaps with another Russian-linked entity referred to as Saint Bear. At present available evidence strongly suggests these are distinct activities with different behavioral profiles.[2][5]
47
TechniquesTop 17%
15
TacticsTop 1%
11
Tools & malwareTop 16%
0
CampaignsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
Ember Bear gathers victim system information such as enumerating the volume of a given device or extracting system and security event logs for analysis.1415
Ember Bear has used tools such as Nmap and MASSCAN for remote service discovery.16
Discovery39 detection rules
Standing G1003
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this group 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 176 ATT&CK groups 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
Techniques47Top 17%
83rd percentile · 83% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics15Top 1%
100th percentile · None of the 176 ATT&CK groups has more tactics spanned — the highest in the population.
Tools & malware11Top 16%
84th percentile · 84% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many tools and malware or fewer.
Campaigns089% tie · 4 values
89% of the population shares a single value across only 4 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique21med54th pct
54th percentile · 54% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many detection rules per technique or fewer.
Tests / technique2med34th pct
34th percentile · 66% of 176 ATT&CK groups have more atomic tests per technique.
Data comps / technique5med65% tie · 12 values
65% of the population shares a single value across only 12 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Mitigations / technique2med43% tie · 11 values
43% of the population shares a single value across only 11 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
5 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this group’s 47 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. (...)
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. (...)