Handala Hack

The cyber risk landscape for 2026 is heavily influenced by regional conflicts, with PRC actors pre-positioning in critical infrastructure edge devices for strategic leverage. Russian actors are escalating hybrid warfare and OT/ICS disruption across Europe, while Iranian groups have decentralized to conduct wiper attacks and target cloud infrastructure. Concurrently, eCrime actors are exploiting these geopolitical tensions to deploy ransomware and infostealers, increasingly targeting hypervisors and industrial operations.

Handala Hack, an Iranian MOIS-affiliated threat actor also known as Void Manticore, conducts destructive wiping and hack-and-leak operations against US, Israeli, and Albanian targets. The group leverages compromised VPN credentials for initial access, uses NetBird for internal tunneling, and deploys multiple parallel wiping techniques—including custom MBR wipers, PowerShell scripts, and VeraCrypt—distributed via Active Directory Group Policy.