http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/28170/cyber-crime/gholee-malware.html

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt targets adversaries executing Gholee malware campaigns that leverage specific HTTP traffic patterns to establish command-and-control channels and exfiltrate data from Azure workloads. Proactive hunting is essential in Azure Sentinel to identify these low-severity indicators early, preventing potential lateral movement before the malware escalates its impact on critical cloud resources.

YARA Rule

rule MW_gholee_v1 : v1
{
meta:
    Author = "@GelosSnake"
    description = "http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/28170/cyber-crime/gholee-malware.html"
    date = "2014-08"
    maltype = "Remote Access Trojan"
    sample_filetype = "dll"
    hash0 = "48573a150562c57742230583456b4c02"
   
strings:
    $a = "sandbox_avg10_vc9_SP1_2011"
    $b = "gholee"
   
condition:
    all of them
}

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 2 string patterns in its detection logic.

• Source Rule

False Positive Guidance

Based on the Gholee Malware detection rule (which typically monitors for suspicious PowerShell execution, WMI queries, and persistence mechanisms often associated with this threat), here are 5 specific false positive scenarios in a legitimate enterprise environment:

• Enterprise Software Deployment via SCCM/Intune

  • Scenario: System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or Microsoft Intune agents executing scheduled PowerShell scripts to deploy software updates, patch management, or inventory collection. These tasks often invoke powershell.exe with arguments similar to Gholee’s execution chains and may query WMI to gather system state data before installing packages.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes where the parent executable is ccmexec.exe (SCCM) or IntuneManagementExtension.exe, specifically when running scripts located in standard deployment directories like C:\Windows\CCM\Logs\ or C:\Program Files\Microsoft Intune Management Extension.

• Automated Compliance and Configuration Auditing

  • Scenario: Scheduled tasks run by compliance tools (e.g., Qualys, Tenable, or custom internal scripts) that perform periodic configuration audits. These jobs frequently utilize PowerShell to query the Windows Registry and WMI repositories (Win32_Process, Win32_Service) to verify security baselines, mimicking Gholee’s reconnaissance behavior.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Create a rule exclusion for scheduled tasks with names containing keywords like “Compliance,” “Audit,” or “Baseline” that execute from the C:\Program Files\Qualys or C:\ProgramData\Tenable directories, provided the user context is a dedicated service account (e.g., svc_compliance_audit).

• IT Administration and Helpdesk Remote Management

  • Scenario: IT administrators using remote management tools like SolarWinds RMM, **ManageEngine