Apostle is malware that has functioned as both a wiper and, in more recent versions, as ransomware. Apostle is written in .NET and shares various programming and functional overlaps with IPsec Helper.[1]
10
Techniques47th pct
7
Tactics68th pct
1
Threat groupunranked
0
CampaignsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
Apostle retrieves a list of all running processes on a victim host, and stops all services containing the string "sql," likely to propagate ransomware activity to database files.3
Apostle writes batch scripts to disk, such as system.bat and remover.bat, that perform various anti-analysis and anti-forensic tasks, before finally deleting themselves at the end of execution. Apostle attempts to delete itself after encryption or wiping operations are complete and before shutting down the victim machine.4
Apostle's ransomware variant requires that a base64-encoded argument is passed when executed, that is used as the Public Key for subsequent encryption operations. If Apostle is executed without this argument, it automatically runs a self-delete function.6
Apostle initially masqueraded as ransomware but actual functionality is a data destruction tool, supported by an internal name linked to an early version, wiper-action. Apostle writes random data to original files after an encrypted copy is created, along with resizing the original file to zero and changing time property metadata before finally deleting the original file.7
Impact56 detection rules
Standing S1133
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this malware 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 825 ATT&CK software entries 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
Techniques1047th pct
47th percentile · 53% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more Enterprise techniques.
Tactics768th pct
68th percentile · 68% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many tactics spanned or fewer.
Threat group161% tie · 22 values
61% of the population shares a single value across only 22 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Campaigns085% tie · 8 values
85% of the population shares a single value across only 8 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique18med41st pct
41st percentile · 59% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique10med
Apostle detections S1133
244 distinct rules cover the 10 techniques recorded for this malware. 147 Sigma · 97 Splunk.
10 covered by at least one rule244 distinct rules in total
Showing 1-50 of 200+ rules
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MITRE ATT&CK
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Detects the deletion of the "Zone.Identifier" ADS. (...)
The following analytic identifies attempts to delete AWS Bedrock Knowledge Bases, which are resources that store and manage domain-specific information for AI models. (...)
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 when all virtual machines on an ESXi host are abruptly terminated, which may indicate malicious activity such as a deliberate denial-of-service, ransomware staging, or an attempt to destroy critical workloads.