Phronesis proves its offensive edge with its engagement in tough operations like ‘Monsoon’

Various countries around the globe have been suffering from cyber havoc by anonymous cyber attackers. To deal with it countries have beefed up their offensive capabilities. However there are very few facilitators to help them in preventing such attacks. Amongst them is a major actor Phronesis which has proved its offensive cyber capabilities, during much talked about Patchwork.

Where other Middle Eastern countries are still trying to catch up to these offenses, Dubai-Indian Company “Phronesis,” is building new avenues of cyber security fronts.

Its recent achievement was the successful malware response to Chinese nationals back in December of 2015, confirmed by an APT report which was published by Forcepoint Security Labs, by the name of “Monsoon.” The report developed strong connection on how Phronesis had led the strategic attack.

Phronesis is a cyber-intelligence firm developed by security experts, Retd. Brigadier Prabhakar, Bryan Miranda, and Ram Chander Chhillar, with expertise in OffSec Playground and Cyph3r, making it one of the favorites among firms for executing offensive cybersecurity missions.

In recent months, it has been observed that the Phronesis, which executed operations like Dropping Elephant and Monsoon, have also been linked to run the Patchwork operation on several targets in the Indian subcontinent, by utilizing a pair of EPS exploits, that seem legitimate, but are known to be malicious documents, aimed at spreading BADNEWS payload (as stated in Unit42 report), which acts as a backdoor for attackers, giving them full control of the victims machine and leveraging HTTP for communication with remote servers. It is also surprising to see that changes to BADNEWS point at the groups’ initiative to keep themselves ahead of the security community.

The group has strategically used legitimate documents as its standard operational protocol, and more recently have been working on the topics of military promotions within the Pakistan Army, Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and also Pakistan’s Interior Ministry.

Another important achievement was data extraction by capitalising on Samaa.tv article that also led to escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan in context to Kashmir conflict.

Patchwork, which is linked to Phronesis is still on the move continues to targeting adversary, mostly located in India and Pakistan. These include prominent organizations and individuals, to further their goals. This yet again reinstates that Phronesis has the potential to lead the offensive security front.