NICKEL

Nickel is a notable threat actor in the cybersecurity landscape, associated with several nation-state affiliated groups such as FIN6, APT15, BackdoorDiplomacy, Vixen Panda, and Emissary Panda. This group has been actively targeting critical Active Directory assets, notably the NTDS.dit file, the KRBTGT service account, and Active Directory certificates. Furthermore, Nickel has been linked to Hyok, a member of the hacking crew known as Andariel (also referred to as APT45, Nickel Hyatt, Onyx Sleet, Silent Chollima, Stonefly, and TDrop2), who is allegedly behind cyberattacks involving a ransomware strain named "Maui," which targeted organizations in the US and Japan as early as 2022. In parallel, nickel, as a commodity, has seen significant activity in recent years. The prices of nickel and zinc peaked in 2022, but increased production from Indonesia and China is expected to suppress prices moving forward. Indonesia, with its $1.2 trillion economy, is the largest global producer of nickel, much of which is mined and processed by Chinese companies. However, there have been allegations of illegal nickel laundering in Indonesia, where companies are accused of mining without licenses and selling the material to processing plants using documents from other companies. On the technology front, developments in data protection have been largely focused on archival technologies, with nickel nanofiche being one of several extreme duration technologies favored. Other technologies include glass - Cerabyte and Microsoft’s Project Silica - as well as a 50 TB tape from IBM and a spun-down disk approach from Disk Archive Corp. While the two glass slab technologies are not yet commercially available, they represent potential tape replacement possibilities. Despite these advancements, nickel nanofiche is not being presented as a commercial archiving technology.