
Copyright Lure to Rhadamanthys Stealer
A procurement officer opened a copyright-infringement notice, followed a shortened link, and ran a signed PDF reader out of a Downloads folder. Follow the chain from a CDN-fronted delivery domain through a DLL search-order hijack and a Run-key autostart to the Rhadamanthys stealer's single command-and-control channel, where the beacon and the stolen data ride together.
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Investigation Tasks
Complete each task by investigating alerts and submitting your findings.
Trace the delivery domain
20An endpoint alert fired on a procurement workstation that downloaded and ran something out of a Downloads folder this morning. The trail starts in the web proxy: the user followed a link in a copyright-complaint email that bounced through a shortener before any file arrived. Establish where the file actually came from.
Name what was actually run
20The archive that came down was not opened as a document. The user extracted it and launched a program from inside it. On the surface that program looks completely legitimate. Identify the executable the user ran.
Find the smuggled module
20A signed program running on its own is not the compromise. The malice was a second file shipped in the same archive and loaded by that trusted program from the wrong place. Recover the module that was loaded.
Classify the execution technique
15For the report, classify the technique that let a malicious module run inside a legitimate signed process by being placed beside it under a system library's name. Map it to its MITRE ATT&CK technique.
Pin down persistence
15Before doing anything noisy on the network, the planted module made sure it would survive a reboot. It registered an autostart entry an ordinary user can write to. Recover the name of the autostart value it created.
Cut off command-and-control
15Once persistence was set, the payload reached out to attacker infrastructure to take orders and ship the data it collected. Both the beacon and the upload used a single destination. Identify the address you would block to sever the channel.
6 tasks · 105 points total
Training Tools
Skills You'll Build
Requires foundational alert triage skills. Multiple data sources to correlate.
Prerequisites
- Basic understanding of security alerts
- Familiarity with SIEM concepts
- Familiarity with XDR concepts
- Familiarity with Firewall concepts
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