CURIUM G1012
Also known as Crimson Sandstorm, TA456, Tortoise Shell, Yellow Liderc.
CURIUM is an Iranian threat group, first reported in September 2019 and active since at least July 2018, targeting IT service providers in the Middle East. CURIUM has since invested in building relationships with potential targets via social media over a period of months to establish trust and confidence before sending malware. Security researchers note CURIUM has demonstrated great patience and persistence by chatting with potential targets daily and sending benign files to help lower their security consciousness.
Documented targeting: Media & Entertainment
Methodology
Relevance is a match on your industry sector and technology stack against the MITRE ATT&CK v19.1 group graph (174 groups, 821 software families, 56 campaigns). It is computed deterministically from that data, with no language model in the request path. It is a relevance match, not threat-intelligence probability data: it tells you which documented actors and techniques are worth emulating for an org like yours, not a forecast that any specific group will act.
TurboPentest can autonomously exercise 0 of 19 of this actor's documented techniques today (0%). 14 are out of scope for automated testing (social engineering, denial of service, physical).
+4 coming soonmore unlock with our internal pentesting agent, currently in private beta.
These counts are computed from the vendored MITRE ATT&CK graph and the published coverage map, and are reproducible from source.
Known software
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Launch this pentestFrequently asked questions
Who is CURIUM (G1012)?
CURIUM is an Iranian threat group, first reported in September 2019 and active since at least July 2018, targeting IT service providers in the Middle East. CURIUM has since invested in building relationships with potential targets via social media over a period of months to establish trust and confidence before sending malware. Security researchers note CURIUM has demonstrated great patience and persistence by chatting with potential targets daily and sending benign files to help lower their security consciousness.
What sectors does CURIUM target?
Based on MITRE ATT&CK, CURIUM has been observed targeting Media & Entertainment.
Can TurboPentest test for CURIUM?
TurboPentest can autonomously exercise 0 of 19 of this actor's documented techniques today. 4 more need internal or assumed-breach access (the Adversarial-Depth tier), and the rest are out of scope for automated testing.
What does it cost to emulate CURIUM?
An Audit-Ready pentest starts at $99 per target. If it surfaces zero actionable findings, your next pentest is free.
Reviewed by
Michel Chamberland, Founder & CEO of IntegSec. CISSP, OSCP, OSCE, with 20+ years in offensive security, alumni of IBM X-Force Red and Trustwave SpiderLabs.
Last reviewed July 30, 2026.