395. Using Folders Associated with Cloud Atlas for Threat Hunting

Hello everyone!

In some cases threat actors use very interesting folders to drop malware and tools thay use - and it can be a great target for hunting!

Let's look at an example. This time it's Cloud Atlas (Cloud Werewolf, Inception). If we look through the report, we can see that the adversary leveraged multiple interesting folders to store malicious files and tools, for example:

  • C:\Windows\ime
  • C:\Windows\System32\ime
  • C:\Windows\pla
  • C:\Windows\inf
  • C:\Windows\migration
  • C:\Windows\System32\timecontrolsvc
  • C:\Windows\SKB
  • C:\Windows\LiveKernelReports
  • C:\Windows\branding

As you can see, these folder are not very common for legitimate executables, so we can use this information to build our hunting query:

event_type: "processcreatewin"

AND

proc_file_path: ("Windows\\ime" OR "Windows\\System32\\ime" OR "Windows\\pla" OR "Windows\\inf" OR "Windows\\migration" OR "Windows\\System32\\timecontrolsvc" OR "Windows\\SKB" OR "Windows\\LiveKernelReports" OR "Windows\\branding")

See you soon!

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