Description, Aliases, Targets, and Personas of the Group APT28 (Essay Sample)

APT28
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APT28
Description and aliases
Apt28 is a threat group which has been attributed to Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), the military unit 26165, and 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS) (Mwiki et al., 2019). APT is known by Microsoft as STRONTIUM, Sednit by FireEye, Sofacy group or Pawn Storm by Kaspersky, and Fancy bear. The group has been active since 2004. The group is founded on their large organized infrastructure, routine toolset, and aptitude to remain secret on compromised network. APT28 is suspected to be working with the Russian Government. Its main initiative is collecting intelligence on defense and geopolitical problems that are relevant to Russian interests. The group promote the political interests of the Russian government and it is known for hacking Democratic National Committee emails to try to influence the outcome of the United States presidential election in 2016 (Mwiki et al., 2019). APT28 group has been targeting security, military, and government organizations in the Caucasus, European security organizations and defense companies, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and other Eastern European nations. APT28 is classified as an advanced persistent threat and it uses malware, spear phishing, and zero-day exploits to compromise targets.
First appearance
The findings concerning a cyber espionage campaign named “operation pawn storm” was published by Trend Micro researcher in 2014 believed that APT28 begun in 2004. The group uses geopolitical-themed spear phishing emails that would be relevant to the recipients to trap them into opening a malicious file attachment that contain the group’s custom backdoor and information stealing malware (Threat Intelligence, 2014). The group also created fake outlook web access login pages to link to in phishing emails to steal user credentials. APT28 also created two malicious iOS applications one impersonates an authentic iOS game called “MadCap” and the other called XAgent. The two applications were found to contain malware Sednit. In June and September of 2014, APT28 used a custom exploit kit termed Sedkit in combination with strategic