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 (3 / 20 total)
All FileHash-MD5 FileHash-SHA1 FileHash-SHA256 domain
TYPEINDICATORDESCRIPTIONCREATED
FileHash-SHA1 0997b6c2fdc3af2de118db559c92ef510c60a994 2026-05-22
FileHash-SHA1 67f41dc48bfd0c0597295259bd3c0d3c09dfea34 2026-05-22
FileHash-SHA1 da11679653ef33952c3dc8d8850e43d7b8ac884a 2026-05-22