dark-caracal

dark-caracal is a skill for Claude Code from PurpleAILAB/Decepticon. It costs 51 tokens per session (5,707 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

An adversary-emulation profile of Dark Caracal, a Lebanon-linked cyber-espionage group known for surveillance campaigns.

In plain words
What is it for?
Modelling Dark Caracal activity, reviewing related threats, and planning defensive tests based on its documented techniques.
Why use it?
It gives security teams a reference for understanding the group’s targets, tools, social-engineering methods, and attack behaviour.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Modelling Dark Caracal activity, reviewing related threats, and planning defensive tests based on its documented techniques.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/purpleailab/decepticon/dark-caracal
About the project

Decepticon is an autonomous red-team agent that coordinates AI agents, security tools, sandboxes, and supporting services for authorized cybersecurity assessments. Security researchers and red teams can run it through its Docker stack, cloud service, command-line interface, or Python SDK, with the catalogue entries representing its available skills.

PurpleAILAB/Decepticon · 5,482 stars · on GitHub · decepticon.red

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add PurpleAILAB/Decepticon --skill dark-caracal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PurpleAILAB/Decepticon

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for dark-caracal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/dark-caracal/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/dark-caracal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/dark-caracal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/dark-caracal/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for dark-caracal

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/dark-caracal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/dark-caracal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,707 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 5 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Privilege Escalation · line 63
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high YARA Match · line 141
    YARA rule matched a hack tool or exploit indicator (offensive tools, reconnaissance, privilege escalation, or exploit frameworks).
    Fix: Remove offensive tool references and exploit code. Legitimate agent skills should not contain penetration testing tools, exploit frameworks, or reconnaissance utilities.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 143
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 144
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 161
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00051 $0.05707
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.02854
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.01141
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00571

Measured 11d ago against content hash 87038e3eb499, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dark-caracal scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

packages/decepticon/decepticon/skills/shared/adversary-emulation/dark-caracal/SKILL.md · 180 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dark Caracal — Adversary Emulation Profile

Dark Caracal (MITRE ATT&CK G0070) is a cyber-espionage and surveillance group attributed to Lebanon's General Directorate of General Security (GDGS), operating since at least 2012. The group is best characterized by its mobile-first surveillance approach — deploying trojanized Android messaging apps (Pallas) to harvest SMS, call logs, contacts, photos, and real-time audio/video — combined with cross-platform desktop RATs (Bandook, CrossRAT) and the commercial spyware FinFisher. Dark Caracal relies on relatively simple social engineering — phishing via Facebook and WhatsApp, watering holes, and trojanized applications masquerading as popular software — rather than advanced zero-day exploitation. Despite this simplicity, the group has compromised thousands of victims across 20+ countries, exfiltrating hundreds of thousands of files and text messages. Evidence suggests the group may also operate as a cyber-mercenary / hack-for-hire entity, conducting campaigns on behalf of other governments (notably Kazakhstan in Operation Manul).

Attribution & motivation

  • Sponsor / nation: Republic of Lebanon — General Directorate of General Security (GDGS), the country's primary intelligence agency. The 2018 EFF/Lookout investigation traced C2 infrastructure to a building adjacent to GDGS headquarters in Beirut, with test devices physically located in the same building.
  • Motivation: Primarily espionage and surveillance — long-term intelligence collection against individuals (journalists, activists, dissidents, lawyers, military personnel) rather than organizations. Secondary motivation includes hack-for-hire / mercenary operations for foreign governments (Kazakhstan in Operation Manul).
  • Attribution confidence: High. Backed by the joint EFF/Lookout 2018 investigation tracing infrastructure to GDGS premises, corroborated by shared infrastructure with Operation Manul (2016 EFF report), and consistent vendor reporting (Check Point, ESET, Positive Technologies, Cofense).

Read the full file on GitHub · 180 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 180 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 87038e3eb499

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dark-caracal is a skill published in the GitHub repository PurpleAILAB/Decepticon (5,482 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 5,707 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.