Mirage Kitten targets Middle East and Africa region with new malware
July 28, 2026 · Kaspersky (Securelist) · Severity: HIGH
The APT group Mirage Kitten (also known as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, or Nimbus Manticore) has been targeting aerospace, aviation, defense, and telecommunications sectors in the Middle East and Africa with a new malware toolkit. Their attacks involve spear-phishing campaigns using fake recruitment portals and impersonated videoconferencing pages to deliver malicious payloads. Kaspersky researchers identified three custom tools: NightLedger, a Windows backdoor for reconnaissance and command execution; and two WebSocket-based tunnelers, ArcBridge and BridgeHead, for covert network access. Specific victims include organizations in Egypt and a Pakistan-based aerospace entity. NightLedger masquerades as SspiCli.dll, uses domains like realhealthshop[.]com for C2 communication, and supports commands like file exfiltration, screenshot capture, and process manipulation. The malware’s deployment follows highly tailored social engineering lures, including recruitment-themed content impersonating trusted brands. BridgeHead, a WebSocket tunneler, was found in Egypt as unbcl.dll and in Pakistan as libwinpthread-1.dll, suggesting targeted post-exploitation activity. The malware checks for specific usernames to evade analysis and connects to C2 servers like smartconnect.azurewebsites.net. This campaign highlights Mirage Kitten’s evolving tactics, leveraging custom malware to maintain persistence and exfiltrate sensitive data from critical sectors. The use of DLL sideloading and WebSocket tunneling demonstrates advanced evasion techniques, posing significant risks to organizations in the region.
Introduction
Mirage Kitten – also known as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, and Nimbus Manticore – is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group focused on cyber-espionage operations against aerospace, aviation, defense, and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East and Africa, using highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns, fake recruitment portals, and custom multi-stage malware to gain persistent access and exfiltrate sensitive data.
During recent threat research, we identified a previously undocumented malware set developed and used by Mirage Kitten. The toolset includes NightLedger, a new Windows backdoor for reconnaissance, command execution, file operations, process discovery, and screenshot capture; and two custom WebSocket-based tunnelers, ArcBridge and BridgeHead, for covert network access and operator-controlled tunneling.
Technical details
Although the initial access vector remains unclear for most malware samples observed in this activity, we saw BridgeHead being deployed during post-exploitation activities in victim environments in Egypt and at a Pakistan-based aerospace and aviation organization. The deployment followed targeted spear-phishing activity consistent with tradecraft we recently documented as part of our private threat intelligence reporting service and publicly reported by Unit 42 and Check Point Research, including the use of highly tailored social engineering lures against selected targets. These lures included recruitment-themed content impersonating trusted brands and hiring platforms, as well as lookalike videoconferencing pages that redirected victims to malicious archives hosted on third-party file-sharing services.
NightLedger backdoor
NightLedger is a recently identified Windows backdoor that we attribute to Mirage Kitten based on code and behavioral similarities to the historical implants developed and used by the group. The implant masquerades as SspiCli.dll and appears to be designed for DLL search-order hijacking, targeting a legitimate AppVShNotify.exe binary. While AppVShNotify.exe does not directly import SspiCli.dll, it imports RPCRT4.dll, which can delay-load SspiCli.dll when it invokes an RPC API that requires authentication. This allows a co-located malicious SspiCli.dll to be loaded while forwarding expected exports to the legitimate DLL.
When started, the malicious DLL creates the mutex A8215357-F99A-44FE-BC65-D8F0434B0C03 to enforce a single running instance. If the mutex already exists, it exits immediately.
NightLedger periodically contacts its C2 over HTTPS, issuing an HTTP GET request to the /edfcvfgbhnjmkqwasderfgg endpoint at the realhealthshop[.]com domain, and uses tjconsultingservices[.]com as a fallback C2.
When a valid C2 response is received, the implant tokenizes the payload using the custom delimiter (#%%#) and passes the parsed fields to its command dispatcher. From a development standpoint, this is similar to TWOSTROKE, a backdoor attributed to the same APT and previously documented by GTIG, whose C2 response is hex-encoded and uses (@##@) as a field separator.
NightLedger supports the following commands:
| Command ID | Description |
| 1 | Gather user and host identity information |
| 3 | Execute a process/program |
| 17 | List directories |
| 20 | Download a file to the infected system |
| 25 | Gather host and network information |
| 27 | Copy a file |
| 30 | Update beacon interval |
| 36 | Take a screenshot |
| 43 | Load a DLL |
| 56 | Kill a process |
| 62 | Delete a file |
| 69 | Terminate thread |
| 70 | Upload file to C2 server via POST request to /qasxcdfvgbhnmyuioplkhnj |
| 75 | Enumerate logical drives |
| 90 | List processes |
| 93 | Collect C:\Windows\debug\NetSetup.log together with process-list output. NetSetup.log is a Windows diagnostic log generated under C:\Windows\debug\ during domain/workgroup join, unjoin, and related network setup operations. |
Command output is returned to the C2 via an HTTP POST request to /wsdefvvbnhyuijkplmbgfrtt.
BridgeHead – a WebSocket tunneler
During our investigation, we encountered a tunnel proxy deployed as unbcl.dll in the %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio directory on a machine in Egypt. We also identified a similar deployment in a Pakistan-based environment, where the tunneling tool was stored as C:\program files (x86)\univpn\promote\libwinpthread-1.dll. The malware dynamically loads advapi32.dll, resolves GetUserNameA, retrieves the current Windows username, converts it to lowercase, and searches for a specific substring in it. This behavior suggests prior reconnaissance was performed within the internal network and the username check is needed to make sure it runs on a specific machine. This is potentially intended to prevent execution of the standalone malware sample inside virtual analysis systems. If the substring is not found, the function returns silently without activating.
If the username check was successful, the tunneler establishes an HTTPS WebSocket connection as follows:
GET /connect HTTP/1.1 Host: smartconnect.azurewebsites.net Upgrade: websocket Connection: Upgrade User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.75 Safari/537.36 Edg/86.0.622.38
The server responds with HTTP 101 (Switching Protocols) to complete the WebSocket upgrade. After the upgrade, the client sends a binary WebSocket message containing the literal string "token" as authentication. The server must respond within 10 seconds, or the connection is dropped and retried with exponential backoff.
The malware’s next action depends on the HTTP response returned by the server:
| HTTP response | Description |
| 407 (Proxy Auth Required) | Queries supported auth schemes via WinHttpQueryAuthSchemes, selects Negotiate (0x10) or NTLM (0x2) in that exact order, sets Windows SSO credentials (null username/password), retries up to 3 times. |
| 101 (Switching Protocols) | Success. Proceeds to WebSocket upgrade and authentication. |
| Other | Connection failed. Closes all handles, enters backoff. |
This implementation closely mirrors the enterprise proxy traversal logic seen in the backdoor we track internally as Retrograde, which overlaps with tooling publicly reported as MiniFast/MiniUpdate, attributed to the same APT group. The implant is designed to operate through corporate proxy environments by handling HTTP 407 responses, negotiating Windows-integrated proxy authentication with Negotiate preferred over NTLM, retrying with the current user’s SSO context, and falling back to exponential C2 connection retry logic capped at 60 seconds.
Once the WebSocket channel is established and authenticated, the implant functions as a full SOCKS5 tunnel proxy. The C2 server initiates all tunnel connections by sending binary commands over the WebSocket; the implant simply forwards traffic between server‑specified targets and the WebSocket channel. This makes it a relay node: the operator runs tools server‑side, and all resulting TCP traffic is tunneled through the victim’s machine as if originating from the victim’s network.
All tunnel communication uses a fixed binary wire format:
| Offset | Size | Field | Encoding |
| 0 | 1 | type | Message type (1–9) |
| 1 | 4 | connId | Tunnel connection identifier |
| 5 | 1 | flags | Status or error indicator |
| 6 | 2 | dataLen | Payload length |
| 8 |