ThreatFox: HypeAgent IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt hypothesis targets adversary behavior involving the deployment or execution of HypeAgent indicators, which often signal reconnaissance activities or lateral movement by threat actors leveraging this specific tool. The SOC team should proactively hunt for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel to rapidly identify and contain potential compromises before adversaries can establish persistence or exfiltrate sensitive data within the cloud environment.

IOC Summary

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

KQL: Ip Hunt

// Hunt for network connections to known malicious IPs
// Source: ThreatFox - HypeAgent
let malicious_ips = dynamic(["194.59.30.96", "46.151.182.98"]);
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(["194.59.30.96", "46.151.182.98"]);
DeviceNetworkEvents
| where RemoteIP in (malicious_ips)
| project Timestamp, DeviceName, RemoteIP, RemotePort, InitiatingProcessFileName, ActionType
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

References

• ThreatFox — HypeAgent

False Positive Guidance

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

• Scenario: Scheduled Patch Deployment via SCCM/Intune

  • Context: The Enterprise Configuration Management (SCCM) or Microsoft Intune service automatically pushes a security agent update to endpoints during off-hours. This triggers the HypeAgent process to download and install new IOC definitions, generating network traffic and file creation events that match the rule’s signature.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the parent process is ccmsetup.exe, Microsoft.IntuneManagementExtension.exe, or TaskScheduler (specifically jobs named “HypeAgent Update”) running between 02:00 and 06:00 local time.

• Scenario: Admin-Initiated Endpoint Health Check

  • Context: A Security Operations Engineer manually triggers a full IOC synchronization on a specific group of high-value servers (e.g., Domain Controllers) using the HypeAgent CLI or GUI console to verify agent health before a quarterly audit. This generates immediate IOCs that look like automated threat detection but are actually diagnostic commands.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Create an exclusion for events where the User Account is a member of the “Security Admins” group and the command line arguments contain flags such as --sync, --health-check, or --force-update.

• Scenario: CI/CD Pipeline Agent Installation

  • Context: During a DevOps deployment, an automated build server (e.g., Jenkins or Azure DevOps) provisions new virtual machines. As part of the provisioning script (provision.sh or setup.ps1), the HypeAgent installer is executed to register the new host with the central management console, triggering IOC registration events.
  • **Filter