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Semperis screenshot of an IP geolocation lookup for 68.65.122.203 placing the Tornado second-stage C2 in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Screenshot: Semperis, IP geolocation for the Tornado second-stage C2 at 68.65.122.203, Oct 22, 2026 (fair use).

Threat Intel

Semperis Says Iran-Linked Prince of Persia Hosted a Tornado C2 Server on U.S. Namecheap Shared Hosting for the First Time Since 2016

Tomer Bar's research puts the Tornado second-stage panel at 68.65.122.203 in Atlanta, active from July 2026, after a three-month pause that followed SafeBreach's February write-up. The group later moved behind Cloudflare. The domains, addresses and what to watch for Telegram and DGA traffic.

Priya Shah, Threat IntelSingapore6 min read

SINGAPORE - An Iranian nation-state group that security researchers have tracked for nearly two decades as Prince of Persia placed a command-and-control server on shared hosting in the United States for the first time in a decade, according to research Semperis published Wednesday.

Tomer Bar, Semperis's AVP of security research and formerly head of SafeBreach Labs, says the Tornado second-stage panel sat at 68.65.122.203, a Namecheap address in Atlanta, and was probably first built on July 7, 2026. The first known domain on that host was kxzsfydnivzmv.privatedns.org. For this group, Bar writes, U.S. soil was "the last place we expected to find the threat actor hiding."

A long pause, then a new bank of servers

Prince of Persia, also discussed around the Infy, Foudre, Tonnerre and Tornado malware families, was first reported globally by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 in 2016. Bar's earlier SafeBreach research in December 2025 and February 2026 documented Tornado as a multi-stage tool that uses HTTPS and the Telegram API as covert channels, rotates domains through a domain-generation algorithm and can change routing through blockchain transaction fields.

After the February 2026 publication, the group shut the C2 at 45.80.148.249 within a week, stood up 45.80.148.194 in the same range and emptied its victim GUID list. Domain registration stopped around Feb. 25. Semperis says the downtime that followed lasted three months, the longest in nearly two decades of tracked activity, and ended on May 27, 2026, when a new C2 at 185.244.129.70 began receiving exfiltration to aa58862c.ddns.net. In the first week alone, Tonnerre pulled more than 1,800 files from one victim Semperis monitored with details masked.

Semperis screenshot of the Namecheap cPanel login page on https://68.65.122.203:2083 for the Tornado second-stage host.
Screenshot: Semperis, cPanel on the U.S.-hosted Tornado second-stage C2, Oct 22, 2026 (fair use).

The May host still used Cyber Panel on port 8090 and the same European hosting provider family the group had used before, but the second-stage Tornado panel was the piece that had been missing since September 2025. When Semperis found it in August 2026, the group had shifted from VPS hosting to a shared Namecheap site managed with cPanel, sitting alongside unrelated domains including Roblox typosquat campaigns.

Cloudflare after discovery

On Aug. 24, 2026, Semperis says, Prince of Persia began building a new Tornado C2 behind Cloudflare at 162.159.24.80 under olbkdmwhacbfc.privatedns.org. Bar suspects the move followed the group's realization that the Namecheap host had been found. The /t/tga.adr Telegram credential file that earlier second-stage panels exposed was no longer available to download under that name.

Semperis redacted exfiltration log showing a masked victim IP, RSA key, machine GUID, C2 domain and timestamps for Tonnerre activity after the May 2026 restart.
Screenshot: Semperis, redacted Tonnerre exfiltration log from the resumed C2, Oct 22, 2026 (fair use).

Victim counts in the monitored set remain low, which Semperis reads as either tight targeting or trouble infecting new hosts. The same resumed infrastructure commanded Tornado as well as Foudre and Tonnerre victims. Semperis publishes domain lists for the Namecheap second-stage host, the Cloudflare front, and the 185.244.129.70 and 185.244.129.123 first-stage, Tonnerre and Foudre panels.

Semperis terminal screenshot of a ping to olbkdmwhacbfc.privatedns.org resolving to the Cloudflare address 162.159.24.80.
Screenshot: Semperis, the Cloudflare-fronted Tornado domain resolving to 162.159.24.80, Oct 22, 2026 (fair use).

What defenders can do

  • Sweep DNS, proxy and firewall logs for 68.65.122.203, 162.159.24.80, 185.244.129.70 and 185.244.129.123, and for the privatedns.org, hbmc.net, space and ddns.net names Semperis lists under each host.
  • Alert on unusual Telegram Bot API traffic from endpoints that have no business talking to Telegram, a channel Tornado and Tonnerre both use as C2 or fallback.
  • Keep WinRAR and other one-day vectors Tornado has used patched, and treat DGA-looking DNS to privatedns.org and hbmc.net as hunt material even when the specific label is new.
  • Update detections against the IOC set in Semperis's post rather than relying on the older 45.80.148.0/24 ranges the group abandoned after February.

Sources:


Priya Shah covers threat intelligence, intrusion analysis, and adversary tradecraft for SOCtember from Singapore.

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