Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a cyber espionage campaign targeting Israel and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq by an Iran state-aligned threat actor between August and October 2026.

According to a report published by Dream Research Labs, the campaign has led to the compromise of a high-profile individual in Israel, along with additional compromises affecting a government cloud environment in the Kurdistan Region.

The activity has been attributed to a threat actor known as DarkBlinders, an Iran-nexus group assessed to be active since at least September 2024 and linked to attacks aimed at aviation infrastructure and telecommunications in the U.A.E. and Iraq. It exhibits no technical overlap with other known hacking groups.

Attacks mounted by the group are known to rely on spear-phishing as an initial access pathway to lure recipients into opening trojanized utilities or clicking on attacker-controlled websites that host similar tools as direct downloads.

Previous attack chains documented by Elastic Security Labs and Group-IB have led to the deployment of SHELBYLOADER (aka HOTAIR), which is launched via DLL sideloading to ultimately execute a backdoor called SHELBYC2 (aka AEROSTAT) that uses GitHub for command-and-control (C2), data exfiltration, and remote control. Elastic is tracking the threat cluster under the moniker REF8685.

Then early last month, Palo Alto Networks shed light on a campaign dubbed Blinder Tunnel in which the threat actor, which it calls CL-STA-1178, was observed masquerading as the Dubai Airports IT department to distribute malware-laced coding challenges to high-value targets.

The bogus recruitment scheme was first detected in late March 2026, although evidence indicates that the attackers were staging and testing attack infrastructure as far back as November 2025.

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