The sample hit VirusTotal with three detections and a comment that just said "lol good luck." Challenge accepted. The binary was a rusted-out loader that unpacked shellcode with enough anti-analysis tricks to make IDA weep. I spun up a sacrificial VM, broke out Frida, and let it stomp across the kernel boundary while I traced syscalls through bleary eyes.

The payload unwrapped into a worm targeting SMB shares with hard-coded creds from a previous breach. Persistence hinged on a scheduled task disguised as telemetry. By the time the first coffee ran out, I had reconstructed the command-and-control protocol and mapped the kill chain: phishing email, malicious driver, worm propagation, data staging, exfil over HTTPS with domain fronting.

Why It Matters🔗

  • The attacker reused tooling. Their obfuscation was clever, but their infrastructure overlapped with a campaign from last winter.
  • The defenders got lucky. An intern flagged the odd network spike, otherwise this would have ransacked the finance cluster.
  • Burnout is part of the threat landscape. Staying sharp on zero sleep is unsustainable, but try telling that to the board during the post-incident review.

I pushed the indicators, wrote the takedown request, and collapsed into the nearest chair. The sun came up anyway.