All news with #dll sideloading tag

📡 ESET researchers have uncovered a new Lazarus Group espionage campaign targeting European defense contractors, with a focus on companies involved in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) development since March 2025. The attackers used spear-phishing with fake job offers and trojanized open-source tools such as WinMerge and Notepad++ to deliver loaders and the custom RAT ScoringMathTea. The intrusion chain relied on DLL side-loading, reflective loading, and process injection to maintain persistence and exfiltrate design and supply-chain data. ESET has published IoCs and MITRE ATT&CK mappings to help defenders respond.

🔒 Symantec reports that China-linked threat actors exploited the ToolShell vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint (CVE-2025-53770) weeks after Microsoft issued a July 2025 patch, compromising a Middle Eastern telecom and multiple government and corporate targets across regions. Attackers used loaders and backdoors such as KrustyLoader, ShadowPad and Zingdoor, and in several incidents employed DLL side-loading and privilege escalation via CVE-2021-36942. Symantec notes the operations aimed at credential theft, stealthy persistence, and likely espionage, with activity linked to groups including Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, Storm-2603 and Salt Typhoon.

🔒In a global intrusion tracked by Darktrace, the China-linked group Salt Typhoon exploited a Citrix NetScaler Gateway vulnerability to gain access and maintain persistence. Attackers employed DLL sideloading to deploy the SNAPPYBEE (Deed RAT) backdoor alongside legitimate antivirus executables, then moved laterally to Citrix Virtual Delivery Agent hosts while obscuring origin via SoftEther VPN infrastructure. C2 channels used HTTP (with Internet Explorer user-agent headers and URIs like "/17ABE7F017ABE7F0") and unidentified TCP protocols; the domain aar.gandhibludtric[.]com has prior links to the group. Darktrace emphasised the need for anomaly-based behavioural detection to surface such stealthy activity early.

🔎 Silver Fox operators have expanded the Winos 4.0 (ValleyRAT) campaign from China and Taiwan to target Japan and Malaysia, and are also deploying a secondary RAT tracked as HoldingHands. The actors use phishing emails with booby‑trapped PDFs, SEO‑poisoned pages and targeted .LNK résumé lures to deliver multiple payloads, including Winos modules and HoldingHands. Observed techniques include DLL sideloading, Task Scheduler recovery abuse, anti‑VM checks and AV termination to maintain persistence and evade detection.

🔍 Huntress Labs analyzed a multi-stage intrusion that began with a phishing ZIP and DLL sideloading and escalated to deployment of the commercial PureRAT backdoor. The operator combined bespoke Python loaders and a Python-based infostealer with compiled .NET loaders, process hollowing, AMSI/ETW tampering, and reflective DLL injection to evade detection. Final-stage configuration revealed a Vietnam-hosted C2 (157.66.26.209) and Telegram infrastructure linked to PXA Stealer, underscoring a shift from custom theft to a professional RAT.

🛡️ Kaspersky developed a machine-learning model to detect DLL hijacking, a technique where attackers replace or sideload dynamic-link libraries so legitimate processes execute malicious code. The model inspects metadata such as file paths, renaming, size, structure and digital signatures, trained on internal analysis and anonymized KSN telemetry. Implemented in the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform, it flags suspicious loads and cross-checks cloud reputation to reduce false positives and support retrospective hunting.

🛡️ Huntress researchers uncovered a multi-stage phishing operation that began with a Python-based infostealer and culminated in the deployment of PureRAT. The campaign used a ZIP lure containing a signed PDF reader and a malicious version.dll to achieve DLL sideloading, then progressed through ten staged loaders that shifted from obfuscated Python to compiled .NET binaries. Attackers used process hollowing against RegAsm.exe, patched Windows defenses (AMSI and ETW), and ultimately unpacked PureRAT, which communicates over encrypted C2 channels and can load additional modules. Metadata linking the activity to the handle @LoneNone and to the PXA Stealer family, plus a C2 server traced to Vietnam, supports attribution to Vietnamese threat actors.

🛡️ Cisco Talos describes an ongoing campaign in which Naikon-linked actors abused DLL search order hijacking to load multiple backdoors, including RainyDay, a customized PlugX variant and Turian. The report highlights shared loaders that use XOR and RC4 decryption with identical keys and an XOR-RC4-RtlDecompressBuffer unpacking chain. Talos notes the PlugX variant adopts a RainyDay-style configuration and includes embedded keylogging and persistence, with activity observed since 2022 targeting telecom and manufacturing organizations in Central and South Asia. Talos published IOCs and recommended mitigations for detection and prevention.

🔍 Check Point Research reports that Iranian-linked actor Nimbus Manticore has escalated cyber-espionage operations across Western Europe, with heightened targeting of organizations in Denmark, Sweden and Portugal. Attackers impersonate recruiters and use convincing fake career portals to deliver personalized credentials and malicious archives. The campaign leverages evolved backdoors—first seen as Minibike, now observed as MiniJunk and MiniBrowse—and employs multi-stage DLL sideloading into legitimate Windows binaries, including Microsoft Defender components, alongside valid code-signing certificates and compiler-level obfuscation to evade detection. Infrastructure hosted via Azure App Service and shielded by Cloudflare provides redundancy and rapid command-and-control recovery.

🛡️ A recent campaign in Latin America leverages oversized SVG image attachments to deliver AsyncRAT by embedding the entire malicious payload inside the XML. Victims receive convincing, urgent emails impersonating judicial services, and interacting with the >10MB SVG loads a fake portal that triggers a password-protected ZIP download containing an executable and a DLL-sideloaded payload. ESET telemetry highlights a spike in activity, notably affecting Colombia, while attackers appear to use AI to generate unique, randomized SVGs to evade detection.

🐍 IBM X-Force reports that China-aligned Mustang Panda is deploying a new USB worm, SnakeDisk, to propagate the Yokai backdoor against machines geolocated to Thailand. The actor also introduced updated TONESHELL variants (TONESHELL8/9) with proxy-aware C2 and parallel reverse shells. SnakeDisk abuses DLL side-loading and USB volume masquerading—moving user files into a subfolder and presenting a deceptive 'USB.exe' lure before restoring originals—to spread selectively on Thailand-based public IPs.

🔍 VirusTotal's AI Code Insight detected a sophisticated phishing campaign that hid malicious JavaScript inside SVG images to impersonate Colombia's judicial system. The SVGs rendered fake portal pages with a bogus download progress bar and displayed a password for a protected ZIP archive that contained malware artifacts. The archive included a renamed Comodo Dragon executable, a malicious DLL, and two encrypted files; when the executable runs the DLL is sideloaded to install further malware. After adding SVG support, VirusTotal found 523 related SVGs that had evaded traditional antivirus detection.