ThreatFox: SmartApeSG IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hypothesis targets potential compromise by the SmartApeSG threat actor, leveraging specific IOCs to identify malicious activity that may have bypassed standard perimeter defenses. Proactively hunting for these indicators in Azure Sentinel is critical to detect early-stage intrusion attempts and limit the adversary’s ability to establish persistence or exfiltrate data within the cloud environment.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: SmartApeSG Total IOCs: 2 IOC Types: domain, url

KQL: Domain Hunt

// Hunt for DNS queries to known malicious domains
// Source: ThreatFox - SmartApeSG
let malicious_domains = dynamic(["winterberrycanto.co"]);
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 - SmartApeSG
let malicious_urls = dynamic(["https://winterberrycanto.co/private/profile-stylesheet.js"]);
UrlClickEvents
| where Url has_any (malicious_urls)
| project Timestamp, AccountUpn, Url, ActionType, IsClickedThrough
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

References

• ThreatFox — SmartApeSG

False Positive Guidance

• Scenario: A DevOps team deploys a new microservice using the smartape container image or library for internal data processing, causing the IOC hash or string to appear in container registry scans or process memory dumps.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the source process is a container runtime (e.g., dockerd, containerd-shim) or where the parent process is a CI/CD agent (e.g., jenkins-agent, github-actions-runner) and the user context is a service account.
• Scenario: An endpoint protection agent (e.g., CrowdStrike Falcon, Defender for Endpoint) performs a scheduled full-system scan and temporarily loads the SmartApeSG IOC signature file into memory for comparison, triggering a memory string match.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the process name matches known EDR scanner binaries (e.g., FalconSensor.exe, MsMpEng.exe) and the operation type is “Read” or “Scan” rather than “Execute” or “Write”.
• Scenario: A security team runs a manual YARA rule validation or threat hunting script that explicitly loads the SmartApeSG IOCs into a test environment or sandbox VM to verify detection coverage.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts originating from known test/sandbox hostnames (e.g., *.test.corp, sandbox-01) or where the user account belongs to the SecurityOps or ThreatHunting group.
• Scenario: A legacy application or third-party plugin (e.g., a specific PDF viewer or media player) includes a bundled component or configuration file that coincidentally matches the SmartApeSG IOA string due to shared library naming conventions or version tags.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Correlate with process lineage; exclude if the parent process is