Hunt: Iran's Prince of Persia (Infy) put a Tornado C2 on US shared hosting (68.65.122.203, Namecheap), then moved behind Cloudflare; DGA domains on privatedns.org, hbmc.net and .space
Semperis says the Iranian state-sponsored group Prince of Persia (also called Infy; Foudre, Tonnerre and Tornado malware) went quiet after SafeBreach's February research and the Feb 28 start of the US-Israel conflict with Iran. It resumed on May 27 and in July stood up its first US-hosted C2 since 2016. Victims are mostly Iranian dissidents and are few, but one exfiltrated 1,800+ files in a week.
- Tornado stage-2 C2:
68.65.122[.]203(AS22612 Namecheap shared hosting, cPanel, from ~Jul 7). Domainskxzsfydnivzmv,jqkctsldgwkbw,emcwoyqtplckl,izwljrmohqwcq,bymznpviesmqs.privatedns[.]org. From Aug 24:olbkdmwhacbfc.privatedns[.]orgon Cloudflare162.159.24[.]80. - Stage-1 / Foudre / Tonnerre C2:
185.244.129[.]70(May to Aug) and185.244.129[.]123(from Sep 1), HOSTGW SRL, CyberPanel on TCP 8090. Watch for 12-letter random labels underhbmc[.]net, 8-letter.spaceand.privatedns[.]orgnames, andf21/t21.ddnsking[.]com. - Older ranges to retro-hunt:
45.80.148.0/24,45.80.149.0/24,45.80.151.0/24and hex-named*.ddns[.]nethosts (e.g.aa58862c.ddns[.]net). - Behavior: exfil over HTTPS POSTs (e.g.
fdir.php) plus the Telegram Bot API. Flagapi.telegram.orgtraffic from hosts with no business need. Tornado has been dropped through one-day bugs such as WinRAR exploits.
Since the actor uses shared hosting and Cloudflare, block the domains and treat the shared IPs as hunting leads, not blocklist entries.
Sources: Semperis: Prince of Persia, a threat group hiding in plain sight (Oct 22, full IOC list) · Semperis press release (Oct 22) · SecurityWeek: Iran's Prince of Persia APT hosts C&C in US for first time since 2016 (Oct 23)