Threat Intelligence Database

A sophisticated spear-phishing campaign targeted individuals in research, policy, and academic fields through emails disguised as materials from an actual academic conference. The attack leveraged a cloud storage link delivering a malicious ISO file containing a PIF executable disguised as a PDF document. The multi-stage loader used EMBED_PAYLOAD_v2 structure to embed both legitimate documents and malicious payloads, which were sequentially extracted and executed in memory. Shellcode injection into explorer.exe ultimately deployed a RokRAT variant communicating with cloud-based C2 infrastructure via pCloud, Dropbox, and Yandex Cloud. The campaign demonstrated advanced social engineering by exploiting information from a real event, combined with sophisticated evasion techniques including process injection and cloud-based command-and-control operations. Attribution analysis linked the activity to APT37 based on infrastructure overlap, code similarities, and operational patterns.