Andariel is a threat group that the Korean Financial Security Institute designated as a subgroup of Lazarus, as Kaspersky reported in 2021. AhnLab described it in 2018 as active since 2015 and linked its activity to earlier operations against South Korean organizations. Its targets span military and defense bodies, political organizations, security and technology companies, energy research, banks, cash machines, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other financially relevant businesses. Characteristic access methods include spear-phishing documents with macros, watering holes that exploit locally used ActiveX software, attacks on centralized management products, and supply-chain compromise. By 2018 it was also expanding reconnaissance beyond Internet Explorer, collecting browser and software details from compromised Korean websites. Activity observed from 2020 into 2021 showed further evolution toward staged in-memory loaders, interactive backdoor use, and selectively deployed custom ransomware, combining intelligence collection with direct financial gain.
Initech
#INITROY • 2016-01
🇰🇷 Korea, Republic of
The INITROY incident involved a compromised financial information security company whose stolen code-signing certificate was used to make malware appear legitimate and distribute signed payloads to organizations via an academic association website server. Linked analysis described downloader and backdoor behavior including service-based persistence, encoded strings, command execution, additional malware download, host-information collection, C2 communication, and North Korea-linked investigative evidence, with FSI later grouping INITROY in the Andariel/Rifle activity set.
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Related Reports
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Affected Countries
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127
Months Since
Related Actors
First seen: 2017-07 •
Last seen: 2026-06