
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.
Start this operation
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
Ready to investigate?
More Operations
View allThe Template That Read the Disk
The file-transfer portal that Tideglow Logistics' partners upload to spent a morning returning host files it was never meant to publish, and finished it running an administrator session nobody had logged into. The root cause is CVE-2024-4040 in CrushFTP 10.6.0. Walk the access logs and firewall traffic step by step to trace how a client holding no credentials turned a request parameter into a read of the host, and that read into a takeover.
OneNote Attachment to RAT: A Guided First Investigation
A logistics contracts employee at Glacierline Freight opens an attachment that arrived in her inbox and clicks a button inside it. Minutes later her workstation is running something that appears on no software inventory and is talking to a host that no business process uses. Walk the email gateway records, the file artifacts and the endpoint process tree one step at a time, and work out for yourself which message carried the delivery, what landed on disk, and what ran.
Hijacked Discord Invite to ClickFix Loader: Tracing the Lure
A finance analyst at Halcyon Wealth Partners followed a recycled Discord invite that quietly redirected the browser to a fake verification page. They did what the page asked, and inside the hour the workstation was running a remote-access trojan alongside an info-stealer that shipped browser data straight out of the building. Walk the proxy, endpoint and firewall evidence step by step to trace the lure, the loader, the C2 beacon and the data theft.