120. IOX: A Port Forwarding Tool You Don't See Very Often

Hello everyone!

We're seeing tunneling tools more and more often. So often that tools like ngrok and chisel are detected and blocked (yes?) immediately nowadays. What does it mean? The threat actors are always looking for alternatives!

And one of such alternatives is iox. It's an open source port forwarding and intranet proxy tool that's been used, for example, by Ghost ransomware gang.

It's commonly abused for RDP and SSH port forwarding, so we can build our hunting query based on this:

event_type: "processcreate"

AND

cmdline: "fwd" AND ("22" OR "3389")

More information on the tool is available here.

See you tomorrow!

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