Connecting dots: Moonlight Maze cyber espionage campaigns to the Turla APT group

Moonlight Maze is the code name assigned to one of the first detected cyber espionage campaigns that targeted a number of critical U.S. government agencies, including the Pentagon, NASA and the Department of Energy. Threat actors behind the Moonlight Maze were focused on UNIX systems such as Sun Solaris, while the Turla APT is more specialized in attacks on Windows systems.

Guerrero-Saade explained that of the 45 Moonlight Maze binaries that were detected by experts at Kaspersky, nine of them were examples of the LOKI2 backdoor. This discovery is amazing because it demonstrates a 20-year-old hacking tool is still effective against high-value targets.