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 (3 / 32 total)
All FileHash-MD5 FileHash-SHA1 FileHash-SHA256 domain
TYPEINDICATORDESCRIPTIONCREATED
FileHash-SHA1 27c009dd858214be785455ea97b42b4103309331 2025-12-20
FileHash-SHA1 8d61f9c6205c30f4e88ced1076dc79acb2ec2b69 2025-12-20
FileHash-SHA1 a5f381bd3e08b0e91c61382c7de8ae78f7d69a6e 2025-12-20