DBPEvxxxDingBoy

Hunt Hypothesis

This rule identifies the presence of the “DingBoy” YARA signature, which typically indicates the execution of a specific low-severity malware variant or script-based payload within the environment. Proactively hunting for this indicator allows the SOC team to detect early-stage footholds or lateral movement attempts that may not yet trigger high-fidelity alerts, enabling rapid containment before the adversary establishes deeper persistence in Azure resources.

YARA Rule

rule DBPEvxxxDingBoy
{
      meta:
		author="malware-lu"
strings:
		$a0 = { EB 20 [2] 40 [29] 9C 55 57 56 52 51 53 9C E8 [4] 5D 81 ED }

condition:
		$a0 at pe.entry_point
}

Deployment Notes

This YARA rule can be deployed in the following contexts:

• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — Custom indicators / advanced hunting
• Email Gateway — Attachment scanning
• File Share Monitoring — Periodic scanning of shared drives
• YARA CLI — Manual threat hunting on endpoints

This rule contains 1 string patterns in its detection logic.

• Source Rule

False Positive Guidance

• Scenario: A legacy internal application or custom script uses the DingBoy utility (or a binary with that specific hash/name) as a lightweight notification mechanism for deployment pipelines. For example, a CI/CD agent on a build server executes DingBoy.exe to send a desktop alert to the release manager upon successful build completion.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude the process DingBoy.exe if the parent process is a known build tool (e.g., Jenkins.exe, TeamCity.exe, or Git.exe) and the execution path is within the designated CI/CD workspace directory (e.g., C:\BuildAgents\work\).
• Scenario: An IT support technician manually runs DingBoy from a portable USB drive or a temporary staging folder (C:\Temp\) to test a new internal tool before deploying it via Group Policy. The binary is signed by the internal corporate CA but is not yet in the standard application inventory.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Allow execution if the file is signed by the internal corporate certificate authority (e.g., CN=Corp-Internal-CA) and the user belongs to the IT-Support or App-Admins security group, provided the execution occurs during business hours.
• Scenario: A scheduled maintenance job for a specific database cluster uses DingBoy as a wrapper script to log status messages to a local console before forwarding them to a central logging agent. The job runs under a dedicated service account (svc-db-maint) at 2:00 AM.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude the rule if the process is launched by a scheduled task named DB-Maintenance-Log and the executing user is svc-db-maint, ensuring the binary path matches the expected service directory (e.g., `C:\Program Files\Corp