The Iranian hacking group known as MuddyWater has been linked to a new campaign affecting at least nine organizations across nine countries on four continents in the first quarter of 2026.
The activity targeted industrial and electronics manufacturing, education and public-sector bodies, financial services, and professional services, per the Threat Hunter Team from Symantec and Carbon Black. Among the victims is a major South Korean electronics manufacturer, with the attackers spending a week inside its network in February 2026.
Also singled as part of the sprawling espionage effort were an international airport in the Middle East, Southeast Asian industrial manufacturers, and a Latin American financial-services provider.
"The attackers relied heavily on DLL side-loading using legitimately signed Fortemedia (fmapp.exe) and SentinelOne (sentinelmemoryscanner.exe) binaries to execute malicious DLLs while masquerading as benign software," Broadcom's cybersecurity teams said.
The use of "fmapp.exe" to sideload "fmapp.dll" was previously documented by Group-IB in connection with another MuddyWater campaign codenamed Operation Olalampo. According to Huntress, the DLL contains code to connect to an attacker-controlled IP address ("157.20.182[.]49").
