Meet UNC1860: Iran's Low-Key Access Broker for State Hackers

Source: Christophe Coat via Alamy Stock Photo

An advanced persistent threat (APT) tied to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) is providing initial access services to a bevy of Iranian state hacking groups.

UNC1860 has been the gateway for attacks by notorious groups like Scarred Manticore and OilRig (aka APT34, Helix Kitten, Cobalt Gypsym, Lyceum, Crambus, or Siamesekitten). As Mandiant explained in a recent blog post, its focus is exclusively on breaching and establishing a foothold in potentially valuable networks across high-value sectors — government, media, academia, critical infrastructure, and particularly telecommunications — then handing over access to other Iranian nation-state actors.

Over the years, UNC1860 has teamed up for attacks against targets in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar; aided in espionage of Mideast telecommunications companies; prepared the ground for wiper attacks in Albania and Israel; and more.

UNC1860’s Many Backdoors

In March, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warned that wiper attacks were striking organizations across the country, including managed service providers, local governments, and academic institutions. Among the indicators of compromise (IoCs) were a Web shell called “Stayshante” and a dropper called “Sasheyaway,” just two of around 30 custom malware tools managed by UNC1860, the Mandiant report explained.

UNC1860 isn’t the one doing the wiping, or any other disruptive, destructive, or otherwise exploitative behavior in a target’s network. Its job is merely to gain that initial foothold, primarily by scanning for vulnerabilities in public-facing assets at targeted organizations, then dropping a series of increasingly serious and sophisticated backdoors.

Stayshante, Sasheyaway, and tools like it provide its first toe in the water, and can be used to download more substantial backdoors like “Templedoor,” “Faceface,” and “Sparkload.” For its highest-value targets, UNC1860 will deploy its most sophisticated, main-stage backdoors like “Templedrop,” or “Oatboat,” which loads and executes payloads such as “Tofupipe” and “Tofuload,” TCP-based passive listeners.

“To set up those listeners, they are not even leveraging regular Windows API calls — they actually leverage some undocumented tools of HTTP.sys, which is crazy,” says Stav Shulman, senior researcher with Mandiant by Google Cloud.

“Most backdoors would leverage common API calling, so most engines would detect them,” Shulman explains. “But if you are determined enough, and clever enough, and if you have extraordinary technical knowledge, you can leverage calls that are not documented by the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). So UNC1860 actually reverse engineered them themselves, so that you won’t detect their calls.”

UNC1860’s Trick to Staying Undetected

Besides its lack of destructive behavior, there’s another reason why you hear about Scarred Manticore, Oil Rig, and Shrouded Snooper, but rarely UNC1860: All of UNC1860s implants are entirely passive. It doesn’t send any information out from target networks, and doesn’t need to maintain any kind of command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.

“Most detections today are very focused on outbound communications, but UNC1860 just focuses on inbound requests,” Shulman says. “That inbound traffic they listen to can come from any number of stealthy sources [including] VPN nodes in proximity to the target, other victims of prior attacks, and other locations in a target’s network.”

In 2020, for example, the group was observed using one of its victims’ networks as a launch point to scan for potentially vulnerable IP addresses in Saudi Arabia, vet various accounts and email addresses associated with domains in Saudi Arabia in Qatar, and target VPN servers in the same region.

And, as Shulman notes, “To escalate the operation, they only need to send one command at any random point in time to activate the backdoor.” Because the group’s implants utilize HTTPS-encrypted traffic, victims will not be able to decrypt its commands or payloads.

Shulman advises organizations to focus on how best to vet incoming network traffic.

“How do we detect [malicious traffic]? How do we decide if incoming traffic is malicious or not?” Shulman says. “Because even [when UNC1860 is abusing] documented API calls that cybersecurity engines would catch, there’s plenty of legitimate software that use these same calls, so detecting malicious calls could be very confusing and have lots of false positives. Focusing on the incoming traffic is the key, I think, for detecting UNC1860’s activity.”

About the Author

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes “Malicious Life” – an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify – and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts “The Industrial Security Podcast,” the most popular show in its field.