ThreatFox: Havoc IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This detection identifies adversary activity involving specific Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) linked to the Havoc post-exploitation tool, which is frequently used by threat actors for command and control or lateral movement within compromised networks. Proactively hunting for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel is critical because early identification of Havoc usage allows the SOC team to rapidly isolate affected assets and disrupt ongoing campaigns 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(["172.188.0.134"]);
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(["172.188.0.134"]);
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

False Positive Scenarios for “ThreatFox: Havoc IOCs”

• Scenario: Legitimate Security Tool Communication

  • Context: The enterprise Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agent (e.g., CrowdStrike Falcon or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint) initiates outbound connections to the ThreatFox cloud service to fetch threat intelligence updates. These connections may match Havoc IOCs if the vendor’s update servers share IP ranges or hash signatures with known Havoc infrastructure.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Create a whitelist rule excluding traffic where the Source Process Name is FalconSensor.exe (or MsMpEng.exe) and the Destination Domain matches the official ThreatFox update domain (e.g., *.threatfox.io).

• Scenario: Scheduled Administrative Backup Jobs

  • Context: A nightly scheduled task runs a custom PowerShell script using the .NET framework to archive logs to an internal repository. The script utilizes a specific DLL or executable that has been previously flagged in ThreatFox as associated with Havoc, triggering the detection during the backup window (e.g., 02:00 – 04:00 UTC).
  • Filter/Exclusion: Implement a time-based exclusion for alerts occurring between 01:30 and 05:00 where the User Account is a service account named svc-backup-admin and the Process Command Line contains the keyword /backup-archive.

• Scenario: Internal DevOps CI/CD Pipeline Execution

  • Context: The internal Jenkins or GitLab Runner server executes build pipelines that download dependencies from a private artifact repository. If this repository mirrors public packages, it may host artifacts with hashes identical to Havoc IOCs, causing the detection rule to trigger during every code deployment cycle.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude