Bazar

These access facilitators distribute their backdoors via malicious links and attachments sent via email.

A smaller subset of entries mention attachments or PDFs containing malicious links, such as 'Wizard Spider has used spearphishing attachments to deliver ... PDFs containing malicious links to download either Emotet, Bokbot, TrickBot, or Bazar' and 'XLoader has been delivered as a phishing attachment, including PDFs with embedded links.'

The content repeatedly describes threat actors and malware using WMI/WMIC/wmiexec for remote execution, lateral movement, discovery, persistence, and administrative actions; e.g., 'APT41 used WMI in several ways, including for execution of commands via WMIEXEC as well as for persistence via PowerSploit' and 'Scattered Spider used Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to move laterally via Impacket.'

During the 2022 Ukraine Electric Power Attack, Sandworm Team leveraged Scheduled Tasks through a Group Policy Object (GPO) to execute CaddyWiper at a predetermined time.

The content repeatedly describes threat actors and malware using PowerShell scripts/commands for execution, download, staging, reconnaissance, persistence, credential access, lateral movement, and defense evasion; e.g., "Sandworm Team used PowerShell scripts to run a credential harvesting tool in memory to evade defenses."

During the 2016 Ukraine Electric Power Attack, Sandworm Team used the xp_cmdshell command in MS-SQL. During the 2025 Poland Wiper Attacks, the adversaries leveraged PsExec to run cmd.exe commands on multiple victim machines. Numerous malware families and groups are described as using cmd.exe, cmd /c, Windows command shell, or command-line interfaces to execute commands, payloads, reconnaissance, persistence, cleanup, and ransomware actions.

Sandworm Team leveraged Microsoft Office attachments which contained malicious macros that were automatically executed once the user permitted them... APT29 has used various forms of spearphishing attempting to get a user to open attachments... DarkGate is distributed through phishing links to VBS or MSI objects requiring user interaction for execution.

Bazar has manually loaded ntdll from disk in order to identity and remove API hooks set by security products. Donut can patch AMSI, WLDP, as well as exit-related Native API functions... Turla has used a AMSI bypass, which patches the in-memory amsi.dll.

During the 2022 Ukraine Electric Power Attack, Sandworm Team leveraged Scheduled Tasks through a Group Policy Object (GPO) to execute CaddyWiper at a predetermined time.

Across the content, malware repeatedly 'adds Registry Run keys', 'creates Registry entries', 'modifies the Windows Registry', or 'overwrites registry keys' to maintain persistence.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors establishing persistence by adding values under HKCU/HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run or RunOnce, and by placing executables, scripts, .lnk files, or .bat files in the Windows Startup folder.

During the 2022 Ukraine Electric Power Attack, Sandworm Team leveraged Scheduled Tasks through a Group Policy Object (GPO) to execute CaddyWiper at a predetermined time.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors injecting shellcode, DLLs, or payloads into legitimate processes such as svchost.exe, explorer.exe, iexplore.exe, cmd.exe, lsass.exe, and browser processes.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors establishing persistence by adding values under HKCU/HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run or RunOnce, and by placing executables, scripts, .lnk files, or .bat files in the Windows Startup folder.

The content repeatedly describes payloads, strings, configuration files, scripts, URLs, and binaries being obfuscated or encoded using Base64, XOR, RC4, AES, RSA, hex encoding, custom algorithms, and other methods across many malware families and threat actors.

Examples throughout the content include 'encrypted payloads decrypted and executed in memory,' 'encrypts its configuration file,' 'AES-encrypted resource,' 'RC4 encrypted embedded scripts,' and 'payload includes an encrypted main component.'

During the 2016 Ukraine Electric Power Attack, DLLs and EXEs with filenames associated with common electric power sector protocols were used to masquerade files.

Akira has used legitimate names and locations for files to evade defenses.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors injecting shellcode, DLLs, or payloads into legitimate processes such as svchost.exe, explorer.exe, iexplore.exe, cmd.exe, lsass.exe, and browser processes.

The content repeatedly describes threat actors and malware deleting files, tools, scripts, logs, droppers, staged data, and artifacts from compromised systems to cover tracks, remove evidence, or self-delete.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors decoding, decrypting, deobfuscating, or unpacking payloads, strings, configuration data, commands, and C2 responses prior to execution or use.

The content includes multiple anti-analysis and environment checks, such as "OopsIE checks for information on the CPU fan, temperature, mouse, hard disk, and motherboard as part of its anti-VM checks" and "Raspberry Robin performs several system checks as part of anti-analysis mechanisms."

Bazar has manually loaded ntdll from disk in order to identity and remove API hooks set by security products. Donut can patch AMSI, WLDP, as well as exit-related Native API functions... Turla has used a AMSI bypass, which patches the in-memory amsi.dll.

Across the content, malware repeatedly 'adds Registry Run keys', 'creates Registry entries', 'modifies the Windows Registry', or 'overwrites registry keys' to maintain persistence.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors querying, enumerating, searching, reading, or checking Windows Registry keys and values, e.g., "ADVSTORESHELL can enumerate registry keys," "APT41 queried registry values to determine items such as configured RDP ports and network configurations," and "Reg may be used to gather details from the Windows Registry of a local or remote system at the command-line interface."

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors using commands and APIs such as ipconfig /all, ifconfig, arp -a, route print, nbtstat, netsh, GetAdaptersInfo, and GetIpNetTable to gather IP addresses, MAC addresses, DNS, DHCP, gateways, routing tables, ARP cache, proxy settings, domains, and network adapter/interface details.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors collecting usernames, identifying logged-in users, running whoami/query user/quser, checking whether the current user is an administrator, enumerating user sessions, and gathering account details from compromised hosts.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors obtaining lists of running processes, using utilities such as tasklist, ps, WMI, Get-Process, CreateToolhelp32Snapshot, EnumProcesses, and similar APIs/commands to enumerate active processes on victim systems.

Brute Ratel C4 can use LDAP queries, net group "Domain Admins" /domain and net user /domain for discovery. OilRig has run net group "domain admins" /domain and net group "Exchange Trusted Subsystem" /domain to get account listings on a victim. Wizard Spider has identified domain admins through the use of net group "Domain admins" /DOMAIN.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors collecting host details such as OS version, hostname, architecture, CPU, memory, BIOS, domain, language, and other configuration data; e.g., "APT41 uses multiple built-in commands such as systeminfo and net config Workstation to enumerate victim system basic configuration information."

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors listing files and directories, enumerating drives, searching for files by extension/name/path, retrieving file metadata, and browsing file systems (for example: "APT28 has used Forfiles to locate PDF, Excel, and Word documents during collection" and "cmd can be used to find files and directories with native functionality such as dir commands").

AdFind can enumerate domain users. APT41 used built-in net commands to enumerate domain administrator users. BloodHound can collect information about domain users, including identification of domain admin accounts.

The content includes multiple anti-analysis and environment checks, such as "OopsIE checks for information on the CPU fan, temperature, mouse, hard disk, and motherboard as part of its anti-VM checks" and "Raspberry Robin performs several system checks as part of anti-analysis mechanisms."

Examples include 'Action RAT can use WMI to gather AV products installed on an infected host,' 'FlawedAmmyy leverages WMI to enumerate anti-virus on the victim,' and 'TA2541 has used WMI to query targeted systems for security products.'

Examples include "Bazar can also check if the Russian language is installed on the infected machine and terminate if it is found," "DropBook has checked for the presence of Arabic language," and "Maze has checked the language of the infected system using the GetUSerDefaultUILanguage function."

The content repeatedly describes threat actors and malware collecting, stealing, identifying, copying, or staging files, documents, credentials, logs, databases, and other information from compromised hosts or local systems.

Recorded Future tracks the creation and modification of new malicious infrastructure for a multitude of post-exploitation toolkits, custom malware, and open-source remote access trojans (RATs). We observed over 17,000 unique command-and-control (C2) servers during 2022...

The IP is then used in URLs of format https://{ip}:443.

IP Transformation The A record of the domains is encrypted, just as in previous versions. Meaning, the four bytes of the IP are XORed with 0xFE. The IP is then used in URLs of format https://{ip}:443. For example, if the domain omleekyw.bazar has an A record of 220.39.239.27, then the actual contacted URL is https://34.217.17.229:443.

André Tavares sent me a Bazar Loader sample whose Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) shows some interesting behavior... The four picked pairs are concatenated into an 8-letter second level domain, and the top level domain .bazar is appended.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors using SSL, TLS, HTTPS, RSA, AES, Blowfish, RC4, ECIES, Diffie-Hellman, OpenSSL, WolfSSL, and mutual TLS to protect command and control traffic.

The content repeatedly describes threat actors and malware disabling, stopping, uninstalling, or modifying antivirus, EDR, Windows Defender, AMSI, logging, and other security controls.