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Threat actor

PowerPool

Last fetched

PowerPool is a threat actor tracked in WhisperGraph's MITRE ATT&CK corpus, observed using 0 techniques and also known as 1 other name.

Also known as

IAmTheKing

Description

Malware developers have started to use the zero-day exploit for Task Scheduler component in Windows, two days after proof-of-concept code for the vulnerability appeared online. A security researcher who uses the online name SandboxEscaper on August 27 released the source code for exploiting a security bug in the Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) interface used by Windows Task Scheduler. More specifically, the problem is with the SchRpcSetSecurity API function, which fails to properly check user's permissions, allowing write privileges on files in C:\Windows\Task. The vulnerability affects Windows versions 7 through 10 and can be used by an attacker to escalate their privileges to all-access SYSTEM account level. A couple of days after the exploit code became available (source and binary), malware researchers at ESET noticed its use in active malicious campaigns from a threat actor they call PowerPool, because of their tendency to use tools mostly written in PowerShell for lateral movement. The group appears to have a small number of victims in the following countries: Chile, Germany, India, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Ukraine. The researchers say that PowerPool developers did not use the binary version of the exploit, deciding instead to make some subtle changes to the source code before recompiling it.

Techniques by tactic

No ATT&CK techniques are recorded for PowerPool in WhisperGraph.

Attributed infrastructure

None published. WhisperGraph carries no ATTRIBUTED_TO edge to PowerPool today — this states the absence of a published link, not that PowerPool has no infrastructure.

References

© The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation.

Related pages

Pivot from PowerPool into its techniques, tactics and any attributed infrastructure.

Queries

Resolves the slug to this actor, merging every duplicate node sharing the same name.


MATCH (a:ACTOR)
WHERE a.name =~ $pattern OR any(x IN a.aliases WHERE x =~ $pattern)
RETURN a.id AS id, a.name AS name, a.aliases AS aliases, a.description AS description,
       a.references AS references, a.campaigns AS campaigns
LIMIT 25
Run yourself →

Techniques this actor uses, grouped by the tactic each one serves.


MATCH (a:ACTOR {name: $name})-[:USES_TECHNIQUE]->(t:ATTACK_PATTERN)
OPTIONAL MATCH (t)-[:USES_TACTIC]->(tac:ATTACK_PATTERN)
RETURN t.id AS techniqueId, t.name AS techniqueName, tac.id AS tacticId, tac.name AS tacticName
LIMIT 1000
Run yourself →

Infrastructure publicly attributed to this actor.


MATCH (n)-[:ATTRIBUTED_TO]->(a:ACTOR {name: $name})
RETURN labels(n)[0] AS kind, n.name AS name
LIMIT 25
Run yourself →

Or query Whisper from your own LLM workflow via the Whisper MCP server.