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December 20, 2022

How to Select the Right Cybersecurity AI

Choosing the right cybersecurity AI is crucial. Darktrace's guide provides insights and tips to help you make an informed decision.
Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Germaine Tan
VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO
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20
Dec 2022

AI has long been a buzzword – we started seeing it utilized in consumer space; in social media, e-commerce, and even in our music preference! In the past few years it has started to make its way through the enterprise space, especially in cyber security.

Increasingly, we see threat actors utilizing AI in their attack techniques. This is inevitable with the advancements in AI technology, the lower barrier to entry to the cyber security industry, and the continued profitability of being a threat actor. Surveying security decision makers across different industries like financial services and manufacturing, 77% of the respondents expect weaponized AI to lead to an increase in the scale and speed of attacks. 

Defenders are also ramping up their use of AI in cyber security – with more than 80% of the respondents agreeing that organizations require advanced defenses to combat offensive AI – resulted in a ‘cyber arms race’ with adversaries and security teams in constant pursuit of the latest technological advancements.  

The rules and signature approach is no longer sufficient in this evolving threat landscape. Because of this collective need, we will continue to see the push of AI innovations in this space as well. By 2025, cyber security technologies will account for 25% of the AI software market.

Despite the intrigue surrounding AI, many people have a limited understanding of how it truly works. The mystery of AI technology is what piques the interest of many cyber security practitioners. As an industry we also know that AI is necessary for advancement, but there is so much noise around AI and machine learning that some teams struggle to understand it. The paradox of choice leaves security teams more frustrated and confused by all the options presented to them.

Identifying True AI

You first need to define what you want the AI technology to solve. This might seem trivial, but many security teams often forget to come back to the fundamentals: what problem are you addressing? What are you trying to improve? 

Not every process needs AI; some processes will simply need automation – these are the more straightforward parts of your business. More complex and bigger systems require AI. The crux is identifying these parts of your business, applying AI and being clear of what you are going to achieve with these AI technologies. 

For example, when it comes to factory floor operations or tracking leave days of employees, businesses employ automation technologies, but when it comes to business decisions like PR strategies or new business exploration, AI is used to predict trends and help business owners make these decisions. 

Similarly, in cyber security, when dealing with known threats such as known malicious malware and hosting sites, automation is great at keeping track of them; workflows and playbooks are also best assessed with automation tools. However, when it comes to unknown unknowns like zero-day attacks, insider threats, IoT threats and supply chain attacks, AI is needed to detect and respond these threats as they emerge.

Automation is often communicated as AI, and it becomes difficult for security teams to differentiate. Automation helps you to quickly make a decision you already know you will make, whereas true AI helps you make a better decision.

Key ways to differentiate true AI from automation:

  • The Data Set: In automation, what you are looking for is very well-scoped. You already know what you are looking for – you are just accelerating the process with rules and signatures. True AI is dynamic. You no longer need to define activities that deserve your attention, the AI highlights and prioritizes this for you.
  • Bias: When you define what you are looking for, as humans inherently we impose our biases on these decisions. We are also limited by our knowledge at that point in time – this leaves out the crucial unknown unknowns.
  • Real-time: Every organization is always changing and it is important that AI takes all that data into consideration. True AI that is real time and also changes with your organization’s growth is hard to find. 

Our AI Research Centre has produced numerous papers on the applications of true AI in cyber security. The Centre comprises of more than 150 members and has more than 100 patents and patents pending. Some of the featured white papers include research on Attack Path Modeling and using AI as a preventative approach in your organization. 

Integrating AI Outputs with People, Process, and Technology


Integrating AI with People

We are living in the time of trust deficit, and that applies to AI as well. As humans we can be skeptical with AI, so how do we build trust for AI such that it works for us? This applies not only to the users of the technology, but the wider organization as well. Since this is the People pillar, the key factors to achieving trust in AI is through education, culture, and exposure. In a culture where people are open to learn and try new AI technologies, we will naturally build trust towards AI over time.

Integrating AI with Process

Then we should consider the integration of AI and its outputs into your workflow and playbooks. To make decisions around that, security managers need to be clear what their security priorities are, or which security gaps a particular technology is meant to fill. Regardless of whether you have an outsourced MSSP/SOC team, 50-strong in-house SOC team, or even just a 2-man team, it is about understanding your priorities and assigning the proper resources to them.

Integrating AI with Technology 

Finally, there is the integration of AI with your existing technology stack. Most security teams deploy different tools and services to help them achieve different goals – whether it is a tool like SIEM, a firewall, an endpoint, or services like pentesting, or vulnerability assessment exercises. One of the biggest challenges is putting all of this information together and pulling actionable insights out of them. Integration on multiple levels is always challenging with complex technologies because they technologies can rate or interpret threats differently.

Security teams often find themselves spending the most time making sense of the output of different tools and services. For example, taking the outcomes from a pentesting report and trying to enhance SOAR configurations, or looking at SOC alerts to advise firewall configurations, or taking vulnerability assessment reports to scope third-party Incident Response teams.

These tools can have a strong mastery of large volumes of data, but eventually ownership of the knowledge should still lie with the human teams – and the way to do that is with continuous feedback and integration. It is no longer efficient to use human teams to carry out this at scale and at speed. 

The Cyber AI Loop is Darktrace’s approach to cyber security. The four product families make up a key aspect of an organization’s cyber security posture. Darktrace PREVENT, DETECT, RESPOND and HEAL each feed back into a continuous, virtuous cycle, constantly strengthening each other’s abilities. 

This cycle augments humans at every stage of an incident lifecycle. For example, PREVENT may alert you to a vulnerability which holds a particularly high risk potential for your organization. It provides clear mitigation advice, and while you are on this, PREVENT will feed into DETECT and RESPOND, which are immediately poised to kick in should an attack occur in the interim. Conversely, once an attack has been contained by RESPOND, it will feed information back into PREVENT which will anticipate an attacker’s likely next move. Cyber AI Loop helps you harden security a holistic way so that month on month, year on year, the organization continuously improves its defensive posture. 

Explainable AI

Despite its complexity, AI needs to produce outputs that are clear and easy to understand in order to be useful. In the heat of the moment during a cyber incident, human teams need to quickly comprehend: What happened here? When did it happen? What devices are affected? What does it mean for my business? What should I deal with first?

To this end, Darktrace applies another level of AI on top of its initial findings that autonomously investigates in the background, reducing a mass of individual security events to just a few overall cyber incidents worthy of human review. It generates natural-language incident reports with all the relevant information for your team to make judgements in an instant. 

Figure 1: An example of how Darktrace filters individual model breaches into incidents and then critical incidents for the human to review 

Cyber AI Analyst does not only take into consideration network detection but also in your endpoints, your cloud space, IoT devices and OT devices. Cyber AI Analyst also looks at your attack surface and the risks associated to triage and show you the most prioritized alerts that if unexpected would cause maximum damage to your organization. These insights are not only delivered in real time but also unique to your environment.

This also helps address another topic that frequently comes up in conversations around AI: false positives. This is of course a valid concern: what is the point of harvesting the value of AI if it means that a small team now must look at thousands of alerts? But we have to remember that while AI allows us to make more connections over the vastness of logs, its goal is not to create more work for security teams, but to augment them instead.

To ensure that your business can continue to own these AI outputs and more importantly the knowledge, Explainable AI such as that used in Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst is needed to interpret the findings of AI, to ensure human teams know what happened, what action (if any) the AI took, and why. 

Conclusion

Every organization is different, and its security should reflect that. However, some fundamental common challenges of AI in cyber security are shared amongst all security teams, regardless of size, resources, industry vertical, and culture. Their cyber strategy and maturity levels are what sets them apart. Maturity is not defined by how many professional certifications or how many years of experience the team has. A mature team works together to solve problems. They understand that while AI is not the silver bullet, it is a powerful bullet that if used right, will autonomously harden the security of the complete digital ecosystem, while augmenting the humans tasked with defending it. 

Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Germaine Tan
VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

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September 23, 2025

It’s Time to Rethink Cloud Investigations

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Cloud Breaches Are Surging

Cloud adoption has revolutionized how businesses operate, offering speed, scalability, and flexibility. But for security teams, this transformation has introduced a new set of challenges, especially when it comes to incident response (IR) and forensic investigations.

Cloud-related breaches are skyrocketing – 82% of breaches now involve cloud-stored data (IBM Cost of a Data Breach, 2023). Yet incidents often go unnoticed for days: according to a 2025 report by Cybersecurity Insiders, of the 65% of organizations experienced a cloud-related incident in the past year, only 9% detected it within the first hour, and 62% took more than 24 hours to remediate it (Cybersecurity Insiders, Cloud Security Report 2025).

Despite the shift to cloud, many investigation practices remain rooted in legacy on-prem approaches. According to a recent report, 65% of organizations spend approximately 3-5 days longer when investigating an incident in the cloud vs. on premises.

Cloud investigations must evolve, or risk falling behind attackers who are already exploiting the cloud’s speed and complexity.

4 Reasons Cloud Investigations Are Broken

The cloud’s dynamic nature – with its ephemeral workloads and distributed architecture – has outpaced traditional incident response methods. What worked in static, on-prem environments simply doesn’t translate.

Here’s why:

  1. Ephemeral workloads
    Containers and serverless functions can spin up and vanish in minutes. Attackers know this as well – they’re exploiting short-lived assets for “hit-and-run” attacks, leaving almost no forensic footprint. If you’re relying on scheduled scans or manual evidence collection, you’re already too late.
  2. Fragmented tooling
    Each cloud provider has its own logs, APIs, and investigation workflows. In addition, not all logs are enabled by default, cloud providers typically limit the scope of their logs (both in terms of what data they collect and how long they retain it), and some logs are only available through undocumented APIs. This creates siloed views of attacker activity, making it difficult to piece together a coherent timeline. Now layer in SaaS apps, Kubernetes clusters, and shadow IT — suddenly you’re stitching together 20+ tools just to find out what happened. Analysts call it the ‘swivel-chair Olympics,’ and it’s burning hours they don’t have.
  3. SOC overload
    Analysts spend the bulk of their time manually gathering evidence and correlating logs rather than responding to threats. This slows down investigations and increases burnout. SOC teams are drowning in noise; they receive thousands of alerts a day, the majority of which never get touched. False positives eat hundreds of hours a month, and consequently burnout is rife.  
  4. Cost of delay
    The longer an investigation takes, the higher its cost. Breaches contained in under 200 days save an average of over $1M compared to those that linger (IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025).

These challenges create a dangerous gap for threat actors to exploit. By the time evidence is collected, attackers may have already accessed or exfiltrated data, or entrenched themselves deeper into your environment.

What’s Needed: A New Approach to Cloud Investigations

It’s time to ditch the manual, reactive grind and embrace investigations that are automated, proactive, and built for the world you actually defend. Here’s what the next generation of cloud forensics must deliver:

  • Automated evidence acquisition
    Capture forensic-level data the moment a threat is detected and before assets disappear.
  • Unified multi-cloud visibility
    Stitch together logs, timelines, and context across AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments into a single unified view of the investigation.
  • Accelerated investigation workflows
    Reduce time-to-insight from hours or days to minutes with automated analysis of forensic data, enabling faster containment and recovery.
  • Empowered SOC teams
    Fully contextualised data and collaboration workflows between teams in the SOC ensure seamless handover, freeing up analysts from manual collection tasks so they can focus on what matters: analysis and response.

Attackers are already leveraging the cloud’s agility. Defenders must do the same — adopting solutions that match the speed and scale of modern infrastructure.

Cloud Changed Everything. It’s Time to Change Investigations.  

The cloud fundamentally reshaped how businesses operate. It’s time for security teams to rethink how they investigate threats.

Forensics can no longer be slow, manual, and reactive. It must be instant, automated, and cloud-first — designed to meet the demands of ephemeral infrastructure and multi-cloud complexity.

The future of incident response isn’t just faster. It’s smarter, more scalable, and built for the environments we defend today, not those of ten years ago.  

On October 9th, Darktrace is revealing the next big thing in cloud security. Don’t miss it – sign up for the webinar.

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About the author
Kellie Regan
Director, Product Marketing - Cloud Security

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September 23, 2025

ShadowV2: An emerging DDoS for hire botnet

ShadowV2: An emerging DDoS for hire botnet Default blog imageDefault blog image

Introduction: ShadowV2 DDoS

Darktrace's latest investigation uncovered a novel campaign that blends traditional malware with modern devops technology.

At the center of this campaign is a Python-based command-and-control (C2) framework hosted on GitHub CodeSpaces. This campaign also utilizes a Python based spreader with a multi-stage Docker deployment as the initial access vector.

The campaign further makes use of a Go-based Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that implements a RESTful registration and polling mechanism, enabling command execution and communication with its operators.

ShadowV2 attack techniques

What sets this campaign apart is the sophistication of its attack toolkit.

The threat actors employ advanced methods such as HTTP/2 rapid reset, a Cloudflare under attack mode (UAM) bypass, and large-scale HTTP floods, demonstrating a capability to combine distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) techniques with targeted exploitation.

With the inclusion of an OpenAPI specification, implemented with FastAPI and Pydantic and a fully developed login panel and operator interface, the infrastructure seems to resemble a “DDoS-as-a-service” platform rather than a traditional botnet, showing the extent to which modern malware increasingly mirrors legitimate cloud-native applications in both design and usability.

Analysis of a SadowV2 attack

Initial access

The initial compromise originates from a Python script hosted on GitHub CodeSpaces. This can be inferred from the observed headers:

User-Agent: docker-sdk-python/7.1.0

X-Meta-Source-Client: github/codespaces

The user agent shows that the attacker is using the Python Docker SDK, a library for Python programs that allows them to interact with Docker to create containers. The X-Meta-Source-Client appears to have been injected by GitHub into the request to allow for attribution, although there is no documentation online about this header.

The IP the connections originate from is 23.97.62[.]139, which is a Microsoft IP based in Singapore. This aligns with expectations as GitHub is owned by Microsoft.

This campaign targets exposed Docker daemons, specifically those running on AWS EC2. Darktrace runs a number of honeypots across multiple cloud providers and has only observed attacks against honeypots running on AWS EC2. By default, Docker is not accessible to the Internet, however, can be configured to allow external access. This can be useful for managing complex deployments where remote access to the Docker API is needed.

Typically, most campaigns targeting Docker will either take an existing image from Docker Hub and deploy their tools within it, or upload their own pre-prepared image to deploy. This campaign works slightly differently; it first spawns a generic “setup” container and installs a number of tools within it. This container is then imaged and deployed as a live container with the malware arguments passed in via environmental variables.

Attacker creates a blank container from an Ubuntu image.
Figure 1: Attacker creates a blank container from an Ubuntu image.
Attacker sets up their tools for the attack.
Figure 2: Attacker sets up their tools for the attack.
 Attacker deploys a new container using the image from the setup container.
Figure 3: Attacker deploys a new container using the image from the setup container.

It is unclear why the attackers chose this approach - one possibility is that the actor is attempting to avoid inadvertently leaving forensic artifacts by performing the build on the victim machine, rather than building it themselves and uploading it.

Malware analysis

The Docker container acts as a wrapper around a single binary, dropped in /app/deployment. This is an ELF binary written in Go, a popular choice for modern malware. Helpfully, the binary is unstripped, making analysis significantly easier.

The current version of the malware has not been reported by OSINT providers such as VirusTotal. Using the domain name from the MASTER_ADDR variable and other IoCs, we were able to locate two older versions of the malware that were submitted to VirusTotal on the June 25 and July 30 respectively [1] [2].  Neither of these had any detections and were only submitted once each using the web portal from the US and Canada respectively. Darktrace first observed the attack against its honeypot on June 24, so it could be a victim of this campaign submitting the malware to VirusTotal. Due to the proximity of the start of the attacks, it could also be the attacker testing for detections, however it is not possible to know for certain.

The malware begins by phoning home, using the MASTER_ADDR and VPS_NAME identifiers passed in from the Docker run environmental variables. In addition, the malware derives a unique VPS_ID, which is the VPS_NAME concatenated with the current unix timestamp. The VPS_ID is used for all communications with the C2 server as the identifier for the specific implant. If the malware is restarted, or the victim is re-infected, the C2 server will inform the implant of its original VPS_ID to ensure continuity.

Snippet that performs the registration by sending a POST request to the C2 API with a JSON structure.
Figure 4: Snippet that performs the registration by sending a POST request to the C2 API with a JSON structure.

From there, the malware then spawns two main loops that will remain active for the lifetime of the implant. Every second, it sends a heartbeat to the C2 by sending the VPS_ID to hxxps://shadow.aurozacloud[.]xyz/api/vps/heartbeat via POST request. Every 5 seconds, it retrieves hxxps://shadow.aurozacloud[.]xyz/api/vps/poll/<VPS ID> via a GET request to poll for new commands.

The poll mechanism shadow v2
Figure 5: The poll mechanism.

At this stage, Darktrace security researchers wrote a custom client that ran on the server infected by the attacker that mimicked their implant. The goal was to intercept commands from the C2. Based on this, it was observed initiating an attack against chache08[.]werkecdn[.]me using a 120 thread HTTP2 rapid reset attack. This site appears to be hosted on an Amsterdam VPS provided by FDCServers, a server hosting company. It was not possible to identify what normally runs on this site, as it returns a 403 Forbidden error when visited.

Darktrace’s code analysis found that the returned commands contain the following fields:

  • Method (e.g. GET, POST)
  • A unique ID for the attack
  • A URL endpoint used to report attack statistics
  • The target URL & port
  • The duration of the attack
  • The number of threads to use
  • An optional proxy to send HTTP requests through

The malware then spins up several threads, each running a configurable number of HTTP clients using Valyala’s fasthttp library, an open source Go library for making high-performance HTTP requests. After this is complete, it uses these clients to perform an HTTP flood attack against the target.

A snippet showing the fasthttp client creation loop, as well as a function to report the worker count back to the C2.
Figure 6: A snippet showing the fasthttp client creation loop, as well as a function to report the worker count back to the C2.

In addition, it also features several flags to enable different bypass mechanisms to augment the malware:

  • WordPress bypass (does not appear to be implemented - the flag is not used anywhere)
  • Random query strings appended to the URL
  • Spoofed forwarding headers with random IP addresses
  • Cloudflare under-attack-mode (UAM) bypass
  • HTTP2 rapid reset

The most interesting of these is the Cloudflare UAM bypass mechanism. When this is enabled, the malware will attempt to use a bundled ChromeDP binary to solve the Cloudflare JavaScript challenge that is presented to new visitors. If this succeeds, the clearance cookie obtained is then included in subsequent requests. This is unlikely to work in most cases as headless Chrome browsers are often flagged, and a regular CAPTCHA is instead served.

The UAM bypass success snippet.
Figure 7: The UAM bypass success snippet.

Additionally, the malware has a flag to enable an HTTP2 rapid reset attack mode instead of a regular HTTP flood. In HTTP2, a client can create thousands of requests within a single connection using multiplexing, allowing sites to load faster. The number of request streams per connection is capped however, so in a rapid reset attack many requests are made and then immediately cancelled to allow more requests to be created. This allows a single client to execute vastly more requests per second and use more server resources than it otherwise would, allowing for more effective denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

 The HTTP2 rapid reset snippet from the main attack function.
Figure 8: The HTTP2 rapid reset snippet from the main attack function.

API/C2 analysis

As mentioned throughout the malware analysis section, the malware communicates with a C2 server using HTTP. The server is behind Cloudflare, which obscures its hosting location and prevents analysis. However, based on analysis of the spreader, it's likely running on GitHub CodeSpaces.

When sending a malformed request to the API, an error generated by the Pydantic library is returned:

{"detail":[{"type":"missing","loc":["body","vps_id"],"msg":"Field required","input":{"vps_name":"xxxxx"},"url":"https://errors.pydantic.dev/2.11/v/missing"}]}

This shows they are using Python for the API, which is the same language that the spreader is written in.

One of the larger frameworks that ships with Pydantic is FastAPI, which also ships with Swagger. The malware author left this publicly exposed, and Darktrace’s researchers were able to obtain a copy of their API documentation. The author appears to have noticed this however, as subsequent attempts to access it now returns a HTTP 404 Not Found error.

Swagger UI view based on the obtained OpenAPI spec.
Figure 9: Swagger UI view based on the obtained OpenAPI spec.

This is useful to have as it shows all the API endpoints, including the exact fields they take and return, along with comments on each endpoint written by the attacker themselves.

It is very likely a DDoS for hire platform (or at the very least, designed for multi-tenant use) based on the extensive user API, which features authentication, distinctions between privilege level (admin vs user), and limitations on what types of attack a user can execute. The screenshot below shows the admin-only user create endpoint, with the default limits.

The admin-only user create endpoint shadow v2
Figure 10: The admin-only user create endpoint.

The endpoint used to launch attacks can also be seen, which lines up with the options previously seen in the malware itself. Interestingly, this endpoint requires a list of zombie systems to launch the attack from. This is unusual as most DDoS for hire services will decide this internally or just launch the attack from every infected host (zombie). No endpoints that returned a list of zombies were found, however, it’s possible one exists as the return types are not documented for all the API endpoints.

The attack start endpoint shadow v2
Figure 11: The attack start endpoint.

There is also an endpoint to manage a blacklist of hosts that cannot be attacked. This could be to stop users from launching attacks against sites operated by the malware author, however it’s also possible the author could be attempting to sell protection to victims, which has been seen previously with other DDoS for hire services.

Blacklist endpoints shadow v2 DDoS
Figure 12: Blacklist endpoints.

Attempting to visit shadow[.]aurozacloud[.]xyz results in a seizure notice. It is most likely fake the same backend is still in use and all of the API endpoints continue to work. Appending /login to the end of the path instead brings up the login screen for the DDoS platform. It describes itself as an “advanced attack platform”, which highlights that it is almost certainly a DDoS for hire service. The UI is high quality, written in Tailwind, and even features animations.

The fake seizure notice.
Figure 13: The fake seizure notice.
The login UI at /login.
Figure 14: The login UI at /login.

Conclusion

By leveraging containerization, an extensive API, and with a full user interface, this campaign shows the continued development of cybercrime-as-a-service. The ability to deliver modular functionality through a Go-based RAT and expose a structured API for operator interaction highlights how sophisticated some threat actors are.

For defenders, the implications are significant. Effective defense requires deep visibility into containerized environments, continuous monitoring of cloud workloads, and behavioral analytics capable of identifying anomalous API usage and container orchestration patterns. The presence of a DDoS-as-a-service panel with full user functionality further emphasizes the need for defenders to think of these campaigns not as isolated tools but as evolving platforms.

Appendices

References

1. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/1b552d19a3083572bc433714dfbc2b75eb6930a644696dedd600f9bd755042f6

2. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/1f70c78c018175a3e4fa2b3822f1a3bd48a3b923d1fbdeaa5446960ca8133e9c

IoCs

Malware hashes (SHA256)

●      2462467c89b4a62619d0b2957b21876dc4871db41b5d5fe230aa7ad107504c99

●      1b552d19a3083572bc433714dfbc2b75eb6930a644696dedd600f9bd755042f6

●      1f70c78c018175a3e4fa2b3822f1a3bd48a3b923d1fbdeaa5446960ca8133e9c

C2 domain

●      shadow.aurozacloud[.]xyz

Spreader IPs

●      23.97.62[.]139

●      23.97.62[.]136

Yara rule

rule ShadowV2 {

meta:

author = "nathaniel.bill@darktrace.com"

description = "Detects ShadowV2 botnet implant"

strings:

$string1 = "shadow-go"

$string2 = "shadow.aurozacloud.xyz"

$string3 = "[SHADOW-NODE]"

$symbol1 = "main.registerWithMaster"

$symbol2 = "main.handleStartAttack"

$symbol3 = "attacker.bypassUAM"

$symbol4 = "attacker.performHTTP2RapidReset"

$code1 = { 48 8B 05 ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 8B 1D ?? ?? ?? ?? E8 ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 8D 0D ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 89 8C 24 38 01 00 00 48 89 84 24 40 01 00 00 48 8B 4C 24 40 48 BA 00 09 6E 88 F1 FF FF FF 48 8D 04 0A E8 ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 8D 0D ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 89 8C 24 48 01 00 00 48 89 84 24 50 01 00 00 48 8D 05 ?? ?? ?? ?? BB 05 00 00 00 48 8D 8C 24 38 01 00 00 BF 02 00 00 00 48 89 FE E8 ?? ?? ?? ?? }

$code2 = { 48 89 35 ?? ?? ?? ?? 0F B6 94 24 80 02 00 00 88 15 ?? ?? ?? ?? 0F B6 94 24 81 02 00 00 88 15 ?? ?? ?? ?? 0F B6 94 24 82 02 00 00 88 15 ?? ?? ?? ?? 0F B6 94 24 83 02 00 00 88 15 ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 8B 05 ?? ?? ?? ?? }

$code3 = { 48 8D 15 ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 89 94 24 68 04 00 00 48 C7 84 24 78 04 00 00 15 00 00 00 48 8D 15 ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 89 94 24 70 04 00 00 48 8D 15 ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 89 94 24 80 04 00 00 48 8D 35 ?? ?? ?? ?? 48 89 B4 24 88 04 00 00 90 }

condition:

uint16(0) == 0x457f and (2 of ($string*) or 2 of ($symbol*) or any of ($code*))

}

The content provided in this blog is published by Darktrace for general informational purposes only and reflects our understanding of cybersecurity topics, trends, incidents, and developments at the time of publication. While we strive to ensure accuracy and relevance, the information is provided “as is” without any representations or warranties, express or implied. Darktrace makes no guarantees regarding the completeness, accuracy, reliability, or timeliness of any information presented and expressly disclaims all warranties.

Nothing in this blog constitutes legal, technical, or professional advice, and readers should consult qualified professionals before acting on any information contained herein. Any references to third-party organizations, technologies, threat actors, or incidents are for informational purposes only and do not imply affiliation, endorsement, or recommendation.

Darktrace, its affiliates, employees, or agents shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or harm arising from the use of or reliance on the information in this blog.

The cybersecurity landscape evolves rapidly, and blog content may become outdated or superseded. We reserve the right to update, modify, or remove any content without notice.

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About the author
Nate Bill
Threat Researcher
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