APT24 Deploys BADAUDIO in Multi-Year Espionage Campaign
🛡️ APT24 has deployed a previously undocumented downloader called BADAUDIO to maintain persistent remote access in a nearly three-year campaign beginning November 2022. The highly obfuscated C++ downloader uses control-flow flattening and DLL search-order hijacking to fetch AES-encrypted payloads from hard-coded C2s; analysts observed Cobalt Strike delivered in at least one case. Operators distributed BADAUDIO via watering holes, supply-chain compromises, typosquatted CDNs and targeted phishing, employing FingerprintJS and encrypted cloud-hosted archives to selectively target victims and evade detection.