PULSE NAME
Tracking Iranian APT Screening Serpens’ 2026 Espionage Campaigns
WHITE Screening Serpens AlienVault 2026-05-22 Modified: 2026-05-25
20
IOCs
MEDIUM VOLUME
Unit 42 researchers identified six new remote access Trojan variants deployed by Iran-nexus APT group Screening Serpens between February and April 2026, coinciding with a regional conflict starting February 28, 2026. The group targeted entities in the U.S., Israel, UAE, and other Middle Eastern locations, primarily focusing on technology sector professionals through highly tailored social engineering using personalized recruitment lures. Two new malware families, MiniUpdate and MiniJunk V2, were discovered featuring advanced techniques including AppDomainManager hijacking that manipulates .NET application initialization to disable security mechanisms. The campaigns demonstrated increased technical capabilities and operational resilience, with each variant using dedicated C2 infrastructure hosted on Azure. The attacks leveraged DLL sideloading, scheduled tasks for persistence, and sophisticated evasion techniques to maintain long-term access for espionage purposes.
Indicators of Compromise (4 / 20 total)
All FileHash-MD5 FileHash-SHA1 FileHash-SHA256 domain
TYPEINDICATORDESCRIPTIONCREATED
FileHash-MD5 628d831989787ee1b4ffee611cb2014b 2026-05-22
FileHash-MD5 810f8e3b88eb05f710c09552941d6f56 2026-05-22
FileHash-MD5 cdbe76cdfdec8f7c09781b2ef0fdb7f4 2026-05-22
FileHash-MD5 edcdba624ddb43c2a1dcf334aa493068 2026-05-22