ThreatFox: DCRat IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt targets known indicators of compromise associated with the DCRat malware family, which often leverages specific network artifacts to establish persistence or command-and-control channels. Proactively hunting for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel allows the SOC team to identify potential DCRat infections early, mitigating the risk of lateral movement and data exfiltration before the adversary can fully compromise the environment.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: DCRat Total IOCs: 2 IOC Types: ip:port

KQL: Ip Hunt

// Hunt for network connections to known malicious IPs
// Source: ThreatFox - DCRat
let malicious_ips = dynamic(["45.202.0.111", "45.202.0.116"]);
CommonSecurityLog
| where DestinationIP in (malicious_ips) or SourceIP in (malicious_ips)
| project TimeGenerated, SourceIP, DestinationIP, DestinationPort, DeviceAction, Activity
| order by TimeGenerated desc

KQL: Ip Hunt Device

// Hunt in Defender for Endpoint network events
let malicious_ips = dynamic(["45.202.0.111", "45.202.0.116"]);
DeviceNetworkEvents
| where RemoteIP in (malicious_ips)
| project Timestamp, DeviceName, RemoteIP, RemotePort, InitiatingProcessFileName, ActionType
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

References

• ThreatFox — DCRat

False Positive Guidance

• Legacy Application Deployment via Group Policy: An enterprise IT team deploys a legacy line-of-business application that includes a shared DLL or executable with a known hash (e.g., SHA256: 4c9a...) used by the DCRat family. This file is copied to the C:\Program Files\LegacyApp\bin directory on multiple endpoints during a scheduled GPO refresh.

  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude files located in standard application directories (C:\Program Files\, C:\Program Files (x86)\) if the parent process is a trusted deployment agent (e.g., ccmexec.exe, msiexec.exe) or if the file path matches the known application install path.

• Test Environment or Sandbox Usage: A developer or QA engineer runs a test instance of a third-party software component that shares a binary signature or hash with a DCRat IOC (e.g., a specific version of a Java JAR or Python script) within an isolated VM or container labeled DEV-TEST-01. The file is executed from the user’s home directory (C:\Users\devuser\Documents\test_app\) for manual verification.

  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude detections where the hostname matches a naming convention for non-production environments (e.g., *DEV*, *TEST*, *Sandbox*) or where the file path resides under a user profile directory (C:\Users\*\Documents\) and the parent process is a development tool (e.g., code.exe, python.exe, java.exe).

• Scheduled Backup or Sync Job: A nightly scheduled task (Task Scheduler: \Backup\SyncToNAS) copies a set of application binaries to a network share (\\NAS01\Backups\Apps\). One of the binaries has a hash that matches a D