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The Adobe Flash Player zero-day described in the title was CVE-2015-3113, used in a phishing campaign Mandiant called Operation Clandestine Wolf in June 2015. Mandiant attributed the activity to APT3, also called UPS in its report, and said the exploit chain delivered the SHOTPUT backdoor. This is a historical incident, not a current Flash security alert: Adobe now lists Flash Player as discontinued and unsupported.
What was CVE-2015-3113?
CVE-2015-3113 was a vulnerability in how Adobe Flash Player parsed Flash Video (FLV) files. Mandiant reported that attackers exploited it in June 2015 as part of Operation Clandestine Wolf. The report described the flaw as unpatched at the time of the attack; Adobe subsequently released an out-of-band patch, according to Mandiant.
The campaign name and attribution are those used in Mandiant’s reporting, not universal labels. Mandiant credited the activity to APT3, also known as UPS in its account. Its June 23, 2015 report, Operation Clandestine Wolf – Adobe Flash Zero-Day in APT3 Phishing Campaign, was credited to Erica Eng and Dan Caselden.
How did the exploit reach targets?
- Phishing email: Attackers sent messages containing links to compromised web servers. Mandiant said the emails were generic; its report gave a refurbished-iMac offer as an example: “Save between $200-450 by purchasing an Apple Certified Refurbished iMac through this link. Refurbished iMacs come with the same 1-year extendable warranty as new iMacs. Supplies are limited, but update frequently.”
- Target profiling: After a recipient followed a link, JavaScript on the compromised server profiled the target. Depending on the target, the server could return benign content or malicious Flash content.
- Malicious files: Targets selected by the profiling received a malicious SWF file and an FLV file. The exploit abused Flash’s handling of FLV data.
- Payload delivery: Mandiant described vector corruption that enabled memory read/write capability, followed by Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) to bypass Data Execution Prevention (DEP), alongside techniques intended to evade some ROP detection. Shellcode and a key were packaged in the Flash exploit; the payload was XOR-encoded and concealed inside an image.
- Backdoor execution: The chain ultimately executed SHOTPUT, which FireEye detected as Backdoor.APT.CookieCutter.
Who was targeted, and what happened after compromise?
Mandiant described a large-scale phishing effort aimed at organizations in five sectors:
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The report did not provide a victim total, so the sector list should not be read as a count of confirmed compromises. Mandiant also associated APT3 with quickly dumping credentials, moving laterally to other hosts, and installing custom backdoors. It described the group’s command-and-control infrastructure as difficult to track because overlap across campaigns was limited; these are Mandiant’s observations about the activity it analyzed, not a description of every intrusion.
Is Adobe Flash Player still supported?
No. Adobe’s current support page lists Flash Player among products that are no longer available or supported: Adobe product and technical support periods. Mandiant’s 2015 recommendation to update Flash Player was specific to the incident’s time; it is not current installation guidance. Do not seek out or install Flash Player based on this historical report.
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