TA516
- First seen
- 2017-07-01 00:00:00
- Primary motivation
- financial-gain
- Sophistication
- intermediate
- Resource level
- organization
- Actor type
- criminal
- Profile updated
- 2026-07-07 12:01:02
Targeted industries: financial-services
Context
This actor typically distributes instances of the SmokeLoader intermediate downloader, which, in turn, downloads additional malware of the actor’s choice -- often banking Trojans. Figure 3 shows a lure document from a November campaign in which TA516 distributed fake resumes with malicious macros that, if enabled, launch a PowerShell script that downloads SmokeLoader. In this instance, we observed SmokeLoader downloading a Monero coinminer. Since the middle of 2017, TA516 has used similar macro-laden documents as well as malicious JavaScript hosted on Google Drive to distribute both Panda Banker and a coinminer executable via SmokeLoader, often in the same campaigns.
Reports & references
- thaicert.or.th — Threat Group Cards V2.0 (report)