NeoLitev10

Hunt Hypothesis

This rule detects the presence of the NeoLitev10 YARA signature, which identifies specific malicious or suspicious code patterns often associated with targeted intrusions or low-level persistence mechanisms. Proactively hunting for this indicator in Azure Sentinel allows the SOC team to uncover stealthy threats that may have evaded standard behavioral detections, ensuring early identification of compromised workloads or endpoints within the cloud environment.

YARA Rule

rule NeoLitev10
{
      meta:
		author="malware-lu"
strings:
		$a0 = { 8B 44 24 04 8D 54 24 FC 23 05 [4] E8 [4] FF 35 [4] 50 FF 25 }

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

• Legacy Database Maintenance Scripts: An enterprise application using the NeoLite embedded database (common in older .NET or Java legacy systems) executes a nightly backup or optimization script via schtasks or a Windows Service. The script binary or its associated DLLs may match the YARA signature if the rule targets specific NeoLite version strings or memory patterns.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes where the parent process is svchost.exe (if running as a service) or specific known service executables (e.g., MyAppService.exe) and the command line contains arguments like /backup, /optimize, or /compact.
• Development Environment Local Testing: Developers running local unit tests or integration tests for an application that uses NeoLite in a development VM or workstation. The test harness spawns short-lived NeoLite instances to validate data integrity, triggering the detection due to rapid file creation/deletion or specific API calls.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude events originating from user accounts with the DevTeam or QA security group, or restrict the rule to only trigger if the NeoLite process is running outside of standard development directories (e.g., C:\Users\<dev>\Projects\ or D:\DevEnvs\).
• Third-Party Embedded Application Updates: A vendor-provided desktop application (e.g., a niche inventory management tool or POS system) that bundles NeoLite for local data storage performs an automatic update or database migration. The update process may temporarily load NeoLite DLLs into memory or create temporary database files that match the YARA pattern.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes whose image path resides in known vendor application directories (e.g., C:\Program Files\VendorApp\) and where the parent process is the vendor’s installer or updater executable (e.g., VendorUpdater.exe).
• **Scheduled Data Arch