Phantom Taurus is a newly identified APT aligned with Chinese interests that’s quietly compromising government and telecom targets across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, skipping spear-phishing and going straight for exposed infrastructure and crown-jewel servers.
In this episode, Mitch Mayne talks with Assaf Dahan, Director of Threat Research, Palo Alto Networks Cortex, about what makes this group different: bespoke, stealthy tooling; an infrastructure-first entry path; and a recent pivot toward databases where visibility is thinner.
You’ll hear the 90-second “elevator brief” for CISOs: why basic IT hygiene still blocks most intrusions, how to close visibility gaps with the right telemetry and correlation, and why intel sharing with peers (even competitors) measurably improves defense.
If you protect high-value data or run telco/government workloads, this one’s your field guide.
What We Cover:
00:00 Setting the stage: welcome to CISO Unscripted
00:22 Meet Assaf Dahan (Palo Alto Networks Cortex)
00:55 Who is “Phantom Taurus”? Targets, regions, tooling
01:18 The four angles we’ll cover in this episode
01:53 What makes Phantom Taurus distinct from other APTs
02:26 Homegrown, stealthy malware built over years
03:05 Targeting focus: MEA/Asia gov & telco, and why it matters
03:58 Infrastructure-first intrusions; going straight for crown jewels
05:06 Not spray-and-pray: selective orgs, broad access once in
05:43 The shift from Exchange/email to databases
06:40 Why the pivot: email is watched; databases less visible
08:20 The elevator brief for CISOs
08:50 Priority #1: IT hygiene beats most intrusions
09:38 Closing the visibility gap & shadow IT
10:12 Tools that correlate across endpoints/servers/cloud (XDR mindset)
11:21 The power of threat-intel sharing across industry
12:23 Sharing with partners & competitors to strengthen defenses
13:09 Wrap-up and takeaways
[These are always the same]
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