The success of the Dropping Elephant group is striking given that no zero-day exploits or advanced techniques were used to target high-profile victims – it’s clear that by applying security updates and improving the security awareness of staff, the success of attacks like this can be prevented. At the start of the year we predicted that APT groups would invest less effort in developing sophisticated tools and make greater use of off-the-shelf malware. Dropping Elephant provides a further example of how low investment and use of ready-made toolsets can be very effective when combined with high quality social engineering.