ThreatFox: Venus Stealer IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt identifies network connections or asset matches to known indicators of compromise for the Venus Stealer, a high-severity credential and data theft malware. Proactively hunting for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel allows the SOC to detect early-stage intrusions and isolate affected endpoints before the adversary exfiltrates sensitive credentials or corporate data.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: Venus Stealer Total IOCs: 3 IOC Types: md5_hash, sha256_hash, sha1_hash

Type	Value	Threat Type	First Seen	Confidence
sha256_hash	`f02e2fefd74c7268e3aced61017173fff92e2a1d0e7eaf7807189f371fbfcc1f`	payload	2026-09-06	95%
sha1_hash	`4ae26b9ecf5250d6b1691d4006b629fa39d668d0`	payload	2026-09-06	95%
md5_hash	`756d63bdd8c9a7e95caadaadb8a2124d`	payload	2026-09-06	95%

KQL: Hash Hunt

// Hunt for files matching known malicious hashes
// Source: ThreatFox - Venus Stealer
let malicious_hashes = dynamic(["f02e2fefd74c7268e3aced61017173fff92e2a1d0e7eaf7807189f371fbfcc1f", "4ae26b9ecf5250d6b1691d4006b629fa39d668d0", "756d63bdd8c9a7e95caadaadb8a2124d"]);
DeviceFileEvents
| where SHA256 in (malicious_hashes) or SHA1 in (malicious_hashes) or MD5 in (malicious_hashes)
| project Timestamp, DeviceName, FileName, FolderPath, SHA256, InitiatingProcessFileName
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

Sentinel Table	Notes
`DeviceFileEvents`	Ensure this data connector is enabled

References

ThreatFox — Venus Stealer

False Positive Guidance

Scenario: A DevOps engineer uses curl or wget to download a specific version of a third-party library (e.g., a Python package or Node.js module) from a GitHub release URL that matches the IOCs for the Venus Stealer payload. The download is part of a standard CI/CD pipeline or manual dependency update.
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the source IP is an internal CI/CD runner or build agent, or where the user agent string contains “GitHub-Actions”, “Jenkins”, or “Azure-DevOps”. Additionally, exclude if the process initiating the download is python, node, or npm and the destination path is within a standard project directory (e.g., /var/www/html/project/node_modules/).
Scenario: An IT administrator performs a routine patching or software deployment using a tool like SCCM, Intune, or Ansible, which downloads a specific executable or installer file that happens to share the same hash or URL pattern as one of the Venus Stealer IOCs. The file is verified via checksum before execution.
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude if the parent process is a known deployment tool (e.g., ccmexec.exe, IntuneAgent.exe, ansible-playbook, or powershell.exe invoked by a scheduled task named “PatchManagement”). Also, exclude if the file is located in a standard system or application directory (e.g., C:\Program Files\, C:\Windows\Temp\, or C:\ProgramData\) and the user account belongs to the Domain Admins or Service Accounts group.
Scenario: A security team or blue team conducts a tabletop exercise or live-fire drill where they intentionally download and execute a benign copy of the Venus Stealer sample (or a similar IOCs-matching file) to test detection coverage