PESHiELDv02v02bv02b2

Hunt Hypothesis

This rule detects the presence of the PESHiELDv02v02bv02b2 YARA signature, which indicates the execution or persistence of a specific low-severity malware variant or tooling within the environment. Proactively hunting for this indicator allows the SOC team to identify compromised hosts or dormant payloads before they escalate to higher-impact activities, ensuring timely containment in the Azure Sentinel environment.

YARA Rule

rule PESHiELDv02v02bv02b2
{
      meta:
		author="malware-lu"
strings:
		$a0 = { 60 E8 [4] 41 4E 41 4B 49 4E 5D 83 ED 06 EB 02 EA 04 }

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 developer or DevOps engineer manually executes the PESHiELDv02v02bv02b2 binary (or a script invoking it) to test new build artifacts or verify integrity checks on a staging server.

  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes where the parent process is powershell.exe or cmd.exe and the user belongs to the DevOps or BuildAgents security group, provided the execution path is within a designated C:\Builds\ or C:\Staging\ directory.

• Scenario: An automated scheduled task runs the PESHiELDv02v02bv02b2 utility as part of a nightly data integrity verification job for backup archives, running under the BackupService account.

  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude executions where the parent process is schtasks.exe or taskschd.dll and the account name matches BackupService or svc-backup, with the working directory located in C:\Backups\Verification\.

• Scenario: A third-party endpoint protection agent or custom security tooling embeds the PESHiELDv02v02bv02b2 logic as a helper binary to scan memory dumps or validate PE headers during real-time protection scans.

  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes where the parent process is a known security agent (e.g., MsMpEng.exe for Defender, CrowdStrikeAgent.exe, or SentinelOneAgent.exe) and the binary path resides in the vendor’s installation directory (e.g., C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Defender\ or C:\ProgramData\CrowdStrike\).

• Scenario: An IT admin uses `PESHiELDv02v02bv