ThreatFox: Phantom Stealer IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hypothesis targets the presence of Phantom Stealer, a data exfiltration malware that compromises systems to steal credentials and sensitive files, often introduced via phishing or malicious downloads. Proactively hunting for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel allows the SOC to identify and isolate infected endpoints before the adversary completes the exfiltration of critical data and establishes persistent access.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: Phantom Stealer Total IOCs: 6 IOC Types: sha256_hash, sha1_hash, md5_hash

Type	Value	Threat Type	First Seen	Confidence
md5_hash	`7ea1ac9405b7ffcb6c087e3b65d1462a`	payload	2026-09-10	95%
md5_hash	`41c524a1390a872f207f17a08b443a72`	payload	2026-09-10	95%
sha256_hash	`fc8f02c2dbb35322152f330c0b872bb71ea30d4a74472734531e60de9f2454ef`	payload	2026-09-10	95%
sha1_hash	`ce147e4941248647e59168df4e92e0331416aa0d`	payload	2026-09-10	95%
sha256_hash	`eac635e113733a48d63427369c5456b94ffe8075f447eb6e465157f08ab4c87b`	payload	2026-09-10	95%
sha1_hash	`dddcb764f3af1265392641bbade3632b2f319ab0`	payload	2026-09-10	95%

KQL: Hash Hunt

// Hunt for files matching known malicious hashes
// Source: ThreatFox - Phantom Stealer
let malicious_hashes = dynamic(["7ea1ac9405b7ffcb6c087e3b65d1462a", "41c524a1390a872f207f17a08b443a72", "fc8f02c2dbb35322152f330c0b872bb71ea30d4a74472734531e60de9f2454ef", "ce147e4941248647e59168df4e92e0331416aa0d", "eac635e113733a48d63427369c5456b94ffe8075f447eb6e465157f08ab4c87b", "dddcb764f3af1265392641bbade3632b2f319ab0"]);
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 — Phantom Stealer

False Positive Guidance

Scenario: A security operations engineer manually downloads the PhantomStealer.exe sample from a threat intelligence feed (e.g., VirusTotal or a private IOC repository) to validate the detection rule on a dedicated test VM.
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude files located in specific threat hunting or lab directories (e.g., C:\ThreatHunting\, C:\Lab\) or exclude processes initiated by known security tooling (e.g., powershell.exe with arguments containing -File pointing to the lab path).
Scenario: An IT administrator uses a legitimate backup or file transfer tool (such as Robocopy or WinSCP) to archive sensitive user profile data or application logs to a secondary storage server for compliance retention, which matches the “data exfiltration” behavioral pattern if the rule triggers on high-volume file reads from sensitive paths.
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude known backup and transfer executables (robocopy.exe, winscp.exe, 7z.exe) from the behavioral correlation logic, or whitelist network connections to internal storage subnets (e.g., 10.0.50.0/24) when the source process is a recognized backup agent.
Scenario: A developer or QA engineer runs a local instance of a credential manager or password vault application (e.g., Bitwarden.exe or KeePass.exe) that periodically syncs encrypted credential databases to a cloud endpoint, triggering alerts for “credential theft” or “sensitive file access” if the rule is overly broad on file types like .json or .xml in user profile directories.
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude known password manager executables and their associated helper processes, or filter out file access events where the destination path is within the user’s %APPDATA% or `%LOCALAPPDATA