Operation Pawn Storm: Using Decoys to Evade Detection

Operation Pawn Storm is a Trend Micro investigation into a persistent, multi-year APT campaign that targeted military, diplomatic, and defense contractor personnel across multiple countries using spear-phishing with weaponized attachments (exploiting CVE-2012-0158, CVE-2010-3333), malicious/typosquatted domains and OWA-focused JavaScript phishing, and multistage SEDNIT/Sofacy malware chains (downloaders, keyloggers) to exfiltrate credentials and sensitive data; the report includes case studies, IOCs (file hashes, IPs, domains), and mitigation recommendations.