Security researchers at Kaspersky have spotted a new sophisticated APT group that has been operating under the radar at lease since at least 2012.

Researchers tracked the group and identified a strain of malware it used, dubbed Slingshot, to compromise systems of hundreds of thousands of victims in the Middle East and Africa.

The researchers have seen around 100 victims of Slingshot and detected its modules, located in Kenya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Congo, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Tanzania.

Kenya and the Yemen account for the largest number of infections to date. Most of the victims are individuals rather than organizations, the number of government organizations is limited.

The APT group exploited zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2007-5633; CVE-2010-1592, CVE-2009-0824.) in routers used by the Latvian network hardware provider Mikrotik to drop a spyware into victims’ computers.

“While analysing an incident that involved a suspected keylogger, we identified a malicious library able to interact with a virtual file system, which is usually the sign of an advanced APT actor.” states the report published by Kaspersky.

“This turned out to be a malicious loader internally named ‘Slingshot’, part of a new, and highly sophisticated attack platform that rivals Project Sauron and Regin in complexity.”