PULSE NAME
Evasive SideWinder APT Campaign Detected
WHITE RAZOR TIGER AlienVault 2025-12-20 Modified: 2026-01-19
32
IOCs
MEDIUM VOLUME
A sophisticated espionage campaign targeting Indian entities has been identified, masquerading as the Income Tax Department of India. The activity is associated with the SideWinder APT group, which has evolved its toolkit to evade detection by mimicking Chinese enterprise software. The campaign uses DLL side-loading techniques with legitimate Microsoft Defender binaries to bypass EDR, and utilizes public cloud storage and URL shorteners to evade reputation-based detections. The threat actors employ geofencing behavior, focusing on systems in South Asian timezones. The attack chain includes phishing emails, fraudulent websites, and malicious payloads delivered through file-sharing services. The final stage involves a resident agent that beacons to a command-and-control server, mimicking Chinese endpoint tool protocols.
MITRE ATT&CK & Malware Families
MALWARE FAMILIES
MpGear.dll mysetup.exe
Indicators of Compromise (4 / 32 total)
All FileHash-MD5 FileHash-SHA1 FileHash-SHA256 domain
TYPEINDICATORDESCRIPTIONCREATED
FileHash-MD5 537abad75fc343690119851610d9b54b 2025-12-20
FileHash-MD5 6a3b5fed4383a2e54d70b4a01c44ba01 2025-12-20
FileHash-MD5 7f397f286905114b94da3ec9052cb89d 2025-12-20
FileHash-MD5 eb5bd49b6eef60ff85892ef7c8015b01 2025-12-20