Skip to content

Response, New York. Noah Park: Check Point Patches Actively Exploited Management Server Path Traversal. Detection, Dallas. Ava Okello: Report Finds Nearly Half of Deployed Detections Need Attention Before SOCs Can Trust Them.

SOCtember

Always First. Fast SOC News.

Symantec Threat Hunter Team article headed Swallowtail: Russian Espionage Group Targets Defense Firms in Two NATO Countries, with a shipyard hero image and a dek stating that the Russian group stole credentials and tunneled into the network during a two-month intrusion at a naval shipbuilder.
Screenshot: Symantec / security.com, Swallowtail: Russian Espionage Group Targets Defense Firms in Two NATO Countries, Oct 20, 2026 (fair use).

Threat Intel

Symantec Says Swallowtail (APT28) Hit a NATO Naval Shipbuilder With Hookedge, Stole Credentials Two Ways and Opened a Persistent SSH Tunnel, Then Ran an Undocumented Reflective Loader

Symantec's Threat Hunter Team documents a multi-week intrusion at a naval shipbuilder in a NATO member state by the Russia-linked group Swallowtail, also tracked as APT28, Fancy Bear and Forest Blizzard. Operators stole credentials with an SSH private key and an NTLM self-capture script, opened a backgrounded reverse tunnel into the target network and ran a previously undocumented loader, ld.exe. The indicators and the sequences to hunt.

Priya Shah, Threat IntelSingapore6 min read

SINGAPORE - Symantec's Threat Hunter Team says the Russia-linked espionage group it tracks as Swallowtail, better known as APT28, Fancy Bear and Forest Blizzard, compromised organizations in two NATO member states, including a naval shipbuilder, a manufacturer of military aircraft engines and a law enforcement agency. At the shipbuilder, operators returned to a compromised host over a week, stole credentials with two separate techniques, opened a persistent SSH tunnel into the organization's internal network and deployed a previously undocumented reflective loader.

The U.S. government attributes Swallowtail to Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU. Recorded Future's Insikt Group, which tracks the same group as BlueDelta, first documented the Hookedge backdoor used in these attacks in August 2026 and had seen Hookedge against defense and diplomatic targets in Romania, Spain and Turkey dating back to September 2025. Symantec's write-up, published Oct. 20, fills in what happened after that initial foothold.

Symantec Swallowtail infographic summarizing Russia / GRU attribution, prior DNC and logistics targeting, two NATO member states and three sectors hit, and the four tradecraft items of a dedicated C2 server, an SSH tunnel, NTLM self-capture and an undocumented loader.
Screenshot: Symantec Threat Hunter Team, Swallowtail campaign infographic, Oct 20, 2026 (fair use).

From a Word document to an invisible Edge window

At the naval shipbuilder, Symantec says, the initial infection was a malicious Word document opened from the Outlook attachment cache on the afternoon of July 24, 2026. An obfuscated AutoOpen macro dropped a VBScript launcher, an HTML pair that auto-submitted a form to a webhook.site endpoint, and a batch script.

Symantec description and command block showing the Hookedge batch script killing msedge.exe, deleting stale download artefacts and launching a one-pixel, off-screen Edge window with an inline base64 JavaScript payload that fetched a webhook.site resource.
Screenshot: Symantec Threat Hunter Team, Hookedge batch script launching a hidden Microsoft Edge window as an HTTP client, Oct 20, 2026 (fair use).

That batch script killed any running Microsoft Edge process, cleared stale download artefacts and launched a new Edge window sized to a single pixel and parked off-screen, feeding it an inline base64 JavaScript payload. The decoded JavaScript fetched a resource from a webhook.site endpoint and forced the hidden browser to save the response to disk, using Edge itself as the HTTP client. The first downloaded task was a large reconnaissance batch that probed outbound connectivity to Dropbox, Google, Microsoft's login portal, Mega and a hard-coded IP address, then swept sessions, IP configuration, processes and user directories.

Credential theft, a reverse tunnel and an undocumented loader

About three days later the operators returned with a more capable second stage that abandoned webhook.site for a dedicated IP address, 185.82.218.119. Over a 30-second burst they issued seven tasks in quick succession, a cadence Symantec says is consistent with an operator working interactively. After a whoami check they pushed an SSH private key into C:\ProgramData\Adobe\id_rsa, fixed its permissions and immediately opened an outbound SSH connection back to their own server.

Symantec description and command blocks showing credential-material staging of an id_rsa private key under C:\ProgramData\Adobe and an OpenSSH client command that opens a backgrounded reverse tunnel to 185.82.218.119 on port 80.
Screenshot: Symantec Threat Hunter Team, SSH key staging and reverse-tunnel command used by Swallowtail operators, Oct 20, 2026 (fair use).

The SSH command forced legacy RSA algorithms, disabled host-key checking and used -R, -N and -f together to establish a persistent, backgrounded reverse tunnel from the operators' infrastructure into the target's internal network through the compromised host. A DNS lookup of an internal hostname followed almost immediately.

A few hours later the operators ran a second credential-theft technique: a short PowerShell script that stood up an HttpListener on localhost:8080 and forced the host to authenticate to itself over what looked like an SMB-over-HTTP share, capturing up to four NTLMv2 challenge/response pairs for offline cracking or relay. Symantec compares the technique to the same family as Responder or ntlmrelayx, implemented here as a self-contained script rather than a purpose-built binary.

On July 31 the operators pushed down ld.exe and an encrypted file named Events.dat, then ran:

C:\ProgramData\ld.exe DE063CF3F2E2A83E7B1A277C052A340E C:\ProgramData\Events.dat

Symantec says ld.exe (SHA-256 f1cc91e7427a22027f65d31bbee19c54b602d08d7d93e4745b9cea59fa8132ff) is a reflective loader: it decrypts the supplied file in memory and calls an exported function named ExecuteLoader. The decrypted content begins with the four-byte marker ADSA. Events.dat was not recovered, so its ultimate function is unknown. The same ld.exe hash and the generic Hookedge VBS launcher were still present on the host roughly four weeks later, and the launcher was observed again on Sept. 24.

"Hands-on-keyboard activity means a human operator is choosing what to do next, rather than malware running a fixed routine," Dick O'Brien, principal intelligence analyst on the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, told CyberScoop. "It's essentially confirmation that the organization is a genuine target for the operators, not an accidental infection."

What threat intel and detection teams should do now

  • Hunt for Hookedge delivery: macro-enabled Word documents that drop a VBS launcher plus a batch script that kills msedge.exe and relaunches it with --window-size=1,1 and --window-position=10000,10000, or any Edge process started with a data:text/html;base64 argument.
  • Alert on outbound HTTPS to webhook.site UUID paths used as tasking and on connections to 185.82.218.119 on port 443 or 80.
  • Watch for OpenSSH client activity that writes a private key under C:\ProgramData (especially C:\ProgramData\Adobe\id_rsa) and immediately opens ssh.exe with -R, -N, -f, StrictHostKeyChecking=no and PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa.
  • Detect NTLM self-capture: PowerShell standing up an HttpListener on localhost combined with net use against \\localhost@<port>\c$.
  • Look for ld.exe or any binary run with a 32-character hex key and an encrypted companion file (Events.dat in this case), hash f1cc91e7427a22027f65d31bbee19c54b602d08d7d93e4745b9cea59fa8132ff.
  • Treat any confirmed Hookedge foothold as potentially ongoing. Symantec says organizations that find Hookedge indicators should look for the credential-theft and tunneling activity described here rather than assuming the backdoor's installation was the end of the intrusion.
  • Preserve Outlook attachment-cache artefacts and web-download folders from at least July 24, 2026, on hosts in defense, aerospace and law-enforcement environments where Hookedge is suspected.

Sources:


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

Related stories

Threat Intel desk