ThreatFox: SmartApeSG IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt targets known indicators of compromise associated with the SmartApeSG threat actor to identify potential unauthorized access or lateral movement within the environment. Proactively hunting for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel allows the SOC team to detect and isolate compromised assets before the adversary can establish persistence or exfiltrate sensitive data.

IOC Summary

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

KQL: Domain Hunt

// Hunt for DNS queries to known malicious domains
// Source: ThreatFox - SmartApeSG
let malicious_domains = dynamic(["copperlodestar.info"]);
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://copperlodestar.info/dashboard/beta-cache.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 security operations engineer manually imports the SmartApeSG IOCs (specifically the IP addresses or domains) into a threat intelligence platform like MISP or Cortex XSOAR for correlation testing, causing the detection engine to flag the internal management server’s outbound connections as suspicious.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the source IP is part of the 10.0.0.0/8 or 172.16.0.0/12 private ranges and the destination matches the specific SmartApeSG IOC list, provided the source host is tagged with the security-ops or threat-intel group.
• Scenario: The IT team deploys a new version of a third-party endpoint detection and response (EDR) agent (e.g., CrowdStrike Falcon or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint) that includes a built-in threat intelligence feed containing the SmartApeSG IOCs, resulting in the agent’s telemetry service initiating a heartbeat or update check to the IOC domains during a scheduled maintenance window.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the process name is FalconSensor.exe, MsMpEng.exe, or Defender.exe and the connection type is TCP to port 443 or 80, specifically during the defined maintenance window (e.g., Sundays 02:00–04:00 UTC).
• Scenario: A developer runs a local unit test suite for a network monitoring tool that includes a mock server configured to listen on the specific SmartApeSG IOC IP addresses to validate detection logic, causing the detection rule to trigger on the developer’s workstation or CI/CD build agent.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the source host is part of the dev-ci or build-agents AD group and the process name