ThreatFox: Havoc IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This detection rule identifies adversary activity involving specific Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) linked to the Havoc post-exploitation framework, which is frequently used by threat actors for lateral movement and command execution within compromised networks. The SOC team should proactively hunt for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel because early identification of Havoc artifacts enables rapid containment of active intrusions before adversaries can establish persistence or exfiltrate sensitive data.

IOC Summary

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

KQL: Ip Hunt

// Hunt for network connections to known malicious IPs
// Source: ThreatFox - Havoc
let malicious_ips = dynamic(["46.63.0.187", "109.248.160.184"]);
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(["46.63.0.187", "109.248.160.184"]);
DeviceNetworkEvents
| where RemoteIP in (malicious_ips)
| project Timestamp, DeviceName, RemoteIP, RemotePort, InitiatingProcessFileName, ActionType
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

References

• ThreatFox — Havoc

False Positive Guidance

Here are specific false positive scenarios and corresponding filters for the ThreatFox: Havoc IOCs detection rule in an enterprise environment:

• Scenario: Automated Threat Intelligence Feed Ingestion

  • Context: The Security Operations Center (SOC) utilizes a SIEM or EDR platform that automatically pulls daily threat intelligence feeds. If the “Havoc” campaign is currently active, the ingestion process may download and cache IOCs (IPs, hashes, URLs) associated with Havoc as part of routine enrichment, triggering alerts even though no malicious activity occurred on endpoints.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude network traffic and file hash matches originating from specific internal threat intelligence servers (e.g., ThreatIntel-Server01, CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence) or whitelist the specific IP ranges of the SIEM’s ingestion service accounts.

• Scenario: Scheduled Security Tool Updates and Definitions

  • Context: Enterprise endpoints run scheduled updates for security tools like Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Carbon Black, or Symantec Endpoint Protection. During these update cycles, the agents download definition packs that may include signatures or IOCs related to recent campaigns like Havoc. The agent’s background process (e.g., MsMpEng.exe or cbengine) accessing these specific IOCs can trigger a false positive match.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Create an exclusion rule based on the source process name and user context. Filter out alerts where the Process Name is known security agents (e.g., MsMpEng.exe, cbengine.exe) AND the User Account is a system service account (e.g., NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM or DOMAIN\UpdateService).

• Scenario: Admin-Driven Manual IOC Verification

  • Context: Security analysts or administrators frequently perform manual verification of new IOCs by querying them