ThreatFox: KongTuke IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hypothesis targets the presence of eight specific IOCs linked to the KongTuke threat actor, indicating potential compromise through known malicious artifacts or network indicators. Proactively hunting for these indicators in Azure Sentinel allows the SOC to identify early-stage intrusion attempts and mitigate the high-severity risk before the adversary can establish persistence or execute lateral movement.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: KongTuke Total IOCs: 8 IOC Types: domain, url

KQL: Domain Hunt

// Hunt for DNS queries to known malicious domains
// Source: ThreatFox - KongTuke
let malicious_domains = dynamic(["opsbyte3368.com", "schamserger.top"]);
DnsEvents
| where Name has_any (malicious_domains)
| project TimeGenerated, Computer, Name, IPAddresses, QueryType
| order by TimeGenerated desc

KQL: Url Hunt

// Hunt for access to known malicious URLs
// Source: ThreatFox - KongTuke
let malicious_urls = dynamic(["https://opsbyte3368.com/b", "https://opsbyte3368.com/ue", "https://schamserger.top/api/v1/status", "https://schamserger.top/b", "https://schamserger.top/api/v1/session", "https://schamserger.top/api/v1/verify"]);
UrlClickEvents
| where Url has_any (malicious_urls)
| project Timestamp, AccountUpn, Url, ActionType, IsClickedThrough
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

References

• ThreatFox — KongTuke

False Positive Guidance

• Scenario: A DevOps engineer uses a CI/CD pipeline (e.g., GitHub Actions or Jenkins) to deploy a new version of a microservice that includes a shared library or dependency package containing one of the KongTuke IOCs (e.g., a specific SHA256 hash or file path) as part of a legitimate build artifact.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the source process is a known CI/CD agent (e.g., agent.exe, docker.exe, kubectl.exe) and the parent process is a container runtime or build tool (e.g., dockerd, containerd-shim).
• Scenario: An IT administrator performs a routine software update for a third-party application (e.g., Adobe Creative Suite, Oracle Java, or a specific vendor agent) that bundles a component matching a KongTuke IOC (such as a specific DLL name or registry key) during a scheduled maintenance window.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts occurring during defined maintenance windows (e.g., 02:00–04:00 UTC) where the initiating process is a known update service (e.g., UpdateService.exe, msiexec.exe, wsus.exe) and the user account is a service account (e.g., svc_updater, DOMAIN\svc_patch).
• Scenario: A security team runs a YARA scan or memory dump analysis using tools like yara64.exe or volatility3 on a host, which temporarily creates files or loads modules matching KongTuke IOCs (e.g., specific memory signatures or temporary file paths) as part of the forensic investigation process.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the parent process is a known forensic or scanning tool (e.g., yara64.exe, volatility3.exe, `f