Over the past several months, unrest in the West Bank has grown with 2023 representing one of the most violent years in decades. At the same time, there are a wealth of questions around who will succeed 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas as the leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the governing body in the West Bank. Deteriorating security on the ground and uncertainty around the future of the PA as a governing body raise questions for stakeholders with interests in the region. One such question concerns the capabilities of regional operators, like Pinstripe Lightning.
Past operations attributed to this group can largely be characterized as campaigns to steal information that may provide the group’s leadership with a decision-making advantage. To this end, throughout 2023, Microsoft has observed Pinstripe Lightning operators targeting organizations or individuals with access to information assessed to have intelligence value. While the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed in these campaigns, mainly tailored social engineering lures, publicly-available tools for post-exploitation activities, and the use of a custom implant to persist in targets’ environments, are not sophisticated, they are combined in ways that allow the operators to achieve sophisticated outcomes.
This lightning talk will cover TTPs observed in recent campaigns that Microsoft has attributed to Pinstripe Lightning. It will also discuss the ways in which these capabilities could be positioned to support the group’s economic, political, or security interests in the West Bank.