221. Adversaries Abuse Lua to Load Stealers

Hello everyone!

Command and Scripting Interpreter (T1059) is an extremely popular technique. As you know, often use Windows Command Shell (T1059.003) and PowerShell (T1059.001). But in some cases we can observe more interesting interpreters.

For example, according to this report on SmartLoader, the adversary abused Lua (T1059.011) to run obfuscated malicious scripts. The threat actors distributed archives via GitHub repositores. Each archive contained LuaJIT executable and DLL, an obfuscated malicious Lua script and a batch file to run it.

If you look through the archives, you can see that the DLL is named lua51.dll in all cases, so we use it for our hunting query:

event_type: "imageload"

AND

file_path: "lua51.dll"

See you tomorrow!

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