049. Here's How Mustang Panda Evades AV and How to Detect It

Hello everyone! Let's talk about another sub-technique without any procedure examples - System Binary Proxy Execution: Mavinject (T1218.013).

In the report on recent Mustang Panda activity (they track this cluster under the name Earth Preta, we call it Horned Werewolf), Trend Micro shared how the adversary abused Mavinject.exe to inject malicious code to a running process and bypass ESET detection (but my testing shows that current version of ESET detects it).

To do so, the threat actors use Mavinject.exe with /INJECTRUNNING parameter, for example:

"C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Mavinject.exe" 5928 /INJECTRUNNING "C:\Users\Alice\Desktop\dc673d59a6a9df3d02e83fd03af80e117bea20954602ae416540870b1b3d13c4.dll"

To detect it, let's use the parameter and Mavinject's original file names (adversaries may rename it!):

event_type: processcreate 

AND 

proc_file_originalfilename:("mavinject32.exe" OR "mavinject64.exe") 

AND 

cmdline:"INJECTRUNNING"

Got caught!

See you tomorrow!

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