T1055.002: Portable Executable Injection

Rocke is an alleged Chinese-speaking adversary whose primary objective appeared to be cryptojacking, or stealing victim system resources for the purposes of mining cryptocurrency. The name Rocke comes from the email address "rocke@live.cn" used to create the wallet which held collected cryptocurrency. Researchers have detected overlaps between Rocke and the Iron Cybercrime Group, though this attribution has not been confirmed.[1]

Gorgon Group is a threat group consisting of members who are suspected to be Pakistan-based or have other connections to Pakistan. The group has performed a mix of criminal and targeted attacks, including campaigns against government organizations in the United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, and the United States. [1]

Brute Ratel C4 is a commercial red-teaming and adversarial attack simulation tool that first appeared in December 2020. Brute Ratel C4 was specifically designed to avoid detection by endpoint detection and response (EDR) and antivirus (AV) capabilities, and deploys agents called badgers to enable arbitrary command execution for lateral movement, privilege escalation, and persistence. In September 2022, a cracked version of Brute Ratel C4 was leaked in the cybercriminal underground, leading to its use by threat actors.[1][2][3][4][5]

InvisiMole is a modular spyware program that has been used by the InvisiMole Group since at least 2013. InvisiMole has two backdoor modules called RC2FM and RC2CL that are used to perform post-exploitation activities. It has been discovered on compromised victims in the Ukraine and Russia. Gamaredon Group infrastructure has been used to download and execute InvisiMole against a small number of victims.[1][2]

Havoc is an open-source post-exploitation command and control (C2) framework first released on GitHub in October 2022 by C5pider (Paul Ungur), who continues to maintain and develop it with community contributors. Havoc provides a wide range of offensive security capabilities and has been adopted by multiple threat actors to establish and maintain control over compromised systems.

Carbanak is a full-featured, remote backdoor used by a group of the same name (Carbanak). It is intended for espionage, data exfiltration, and providing remote access to infected machines. [1] [2]

RustyWater is a Rust-based implant used by MuddyWater. Historically, MuddyWater has used PowerShell-based tools and RustyWater reflects a shift in tooling, demonstrating better techniques for defense evasion and reverse engineering.[1]

Lizar is a modular remote access tool written using the .NET Framework that shares structural similarities to Carbanak. It has likely been used by FIN7 since at least February 2021.[1][2][3]

Gootloader is a Javascript-based infection framework that has been used since at least 2020 as a delivery method for the Gootkit banking trojan, Cobalt Strike, REvil, and others. Gootloader operates on an "Initial Access as a Service" model and has leveraged SEO Poisoning to provide access to entities in multiple sectors worldwide including financial, military, automotive, pharmaceutical, and energy.[1][2]

SPAWNCHIMERA is a backdoor that supports command and control and can inject malicious components into native processes.[1][2][3] SPAWNCHIMERA It incorporates capabilities from multiple tools within the SPAWN malware family, including SPAWNANT, SPAWNMOLE, and SPAWNSNAIL.[4][2][3] SPAWNCHIMERA was first reported in April 2024.[2] SPAWNCHIMERA has been observed in activity attributed to People's Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored threat actors, including UNC5221..[4][5][2][6]

GreyEnergy is a backdoor written in C and compiled in Visual Studio. GreyEnergy shares similarities with the BlackEnergy malware and is thought to be the successor of it.[1]

DUSTPAN is an in-memory dropper written in C/C++ used by APT41 since 2021 that decrypts and executes an embedded payload.[1][2]

Pikabot is a backdoor used for initial access and follow-on tool deployment active since early 2023. Pikabot is notable for extensive use of multiple encoding, encryption, and defense evasion mechanisms to evade defenses and avoid analysis. Pikabot has some overlaps with QakBot, but insufficient evidence exists to definitively link these two malware families. Pikabot is frequently used to deploy follow on tools such as Cobalt Strike or ransomware variants.[1][2][3]

Zeus Panda is a Trojan designed to steal banking information and other sensitive credentials for exfiltration. Zeus Panda’s original source code was leaked in 2011, allowing threat actors to use its source code as a basis for new malware variants. It is mainly used to target Windows operating systems ranging from Windows XP through Windows 10.[1][2]

The 3CX Supply Chain Attack was the first publicly reported case of one supply chain compromise triggering another, leading to a cascading, two-stage intrusion. The initial supply chain attack began when a 3CX employee downloaded and executed a trojanized, end-of-life version of the X_Trader trading software from Trading Technologies. This provided UNC4736, a threat cluster associated with AppleJeus, access to the 3CX environment. From there UNC4736 compromised the Windows and macOS build environments used to distribute the 3CX desktop application to their customers.[1] While 3CX serves more than 600,000 customers and 12 million users, only a subset of systems were affected. Subsequent targeting focused on victims in the defense and cryptocurrency sectors, where attackers deployed secondary payloads such as Gopuram for credential theft and persistence.[2] The campaign began in late 2022 and was disrupted after security vendors publicly reported the compromise in March 2023.[3][4]