Predatory Sparrow has emerged as one of the damaging cyber-sabotage teams focusing on essential infrastructure throughout the Center East, with operations centered totally on Iranian and Syrian belongings.
The hacktivist group, believed to be affiliated with Israeli pursuits, has orchestrated a sequence of devastating cyberattacks spanning from 2019 to 2025, focusing on railways, metal vegetation, monetary establishments, and gasoline distribution networks.
Their campaigns are characterised by deliberate knowledge destruction, operational paralysis, and provocative public messaging designed to maximise psychological influence alongside bodily disruption.
The group’s operational timeline reveals an escalating sample of sophistication and destruction. Early assaults in 2019-2020 focused Syrian entities together with Alfadelex Buying and selling and Cham Wings Airways, establishing their capabilities in community infiltration.
Nonetheless, their most vital operation got here in July 2021 after they deployed the “Meteor” wiper malware in opposition to Iran’s nationwide railway system, inflicting widespread service disruptions and displaying taunting messages on station boards.
This assault demonstrated their capacity to compromise essential nationwide infrastructure with precision timing.
Extra just lately, Predatory Sparrow has expanded their focusing on to incorporate monetary infrastructure with devastating impact.
Following Israeli airstrikes on Iran in June 2025, the group launched coordinated assaults in opposition to Financial institution Sepah and the Nobitex cryptocurrency change.
Within the Nobitex breach, they claimed to have rendered $90 million in cryptocurrency completely unrecoverable by transferring belongings to inaccessible addresses, whereas concurrently leaking the change’s full supply code and infrastructure documentation.
Picussecurity analysts recognized the group’s subtle multi-stage assault methodology throughout investigations into the Iranian railway incident.
Their evaluation revealed that Predatory Sparrow employs a posh chain of batch scripts and encrypted payloads to determine persistence, disable defenses, and deploy damaging wipers.
The group demonstrates superior environmental consciousness by conducting reconnaissance to determine particular goal techniques earlier than payload execution.
Technical Execution and Wiper Deployment Mechanisms
The technical structure of Predatory Sparrow’s assaults facilities on their customized Meteor wiper malware, which makes use of encrypted configuration recordsdata and multi-stage batch script execution.
The assault chain begins with a setup.bat script that performs hostname verification in opposition to particular Passenger Info System servers (PIS-APP, PIS-MOB, WSUSPROXY, PIS-DB), making certain malicious payloads keep away from execution on show techniques whereas guaranteeing the attacker’s messaging seems on public-facing boards.
The msrun.bat script serves because the deployment mechanism for the wiper payload, making a scheduled activity configured to execute at 23:55:00 by Home windows Process Scheduler.
Previous to wiper execution, the cache.bat script systematically disables all community adapters utilizing PowerShell instructions:-
powershell -Command “Get-WmiObject -class Win32_NetworkAdapter | ForEach { If ($.NetEnabled) { $.Disable() } }” > NUL
Protection evasion methods embrace clearing Home windows Occasion Logs by wevtutil instructions focusing on Safety, System, and Software logs, successfully erasing forensic proof:
wevtutil cl system
wevtutil cl software
wevtutil cl safety
The Meteor wiper employs XOR-based encryption for its configuration file (msconf.conf) and log recordsdata. Researchers developed Python decryption utilities revealing the malware’s inside operations:
from malduck import xor, u32
def decode_buffer(buf, key):
outcomes = “”
for ok,v in enumerate(buf):
outcomes += chr(((ok % 256) + key[k % len(key)] ^ v) & 0xff)
return outcomes
To make sure full system destruction, the bcd.bat script manipulates boot configuration knowledge and removes quantity shadow copies, stopping restoration:
vssadmin.exe delete shadows /all /quiet
wmic.exe shadowcopy delete
This complete strategy to knowledge destruction and system sabotage demonstrates Predatory Sparrow’s concentrate on inflicting irreversible harm quite than knowledge exfiltration, aligning with their acknowledged mission of retaliatory cyber warfare in opposition to Iranian pursuits.
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