Athena IRC v1.8.x and 2.x may be used by adversaries to establish covert command and control channels, allowing for persistent communication and exfiltration. SOC teams should proactively hunt for this behavior in Azure Sentinel to identify potential compromise and mitigate lateral movement risks.
YARA Rule
rule AthenaIRC
{
meta:
author = "Jason Jones <[email protected]>"
description = "Athena IRC v1.8.x, 2.x identification"
source = "https://github.com/arbor/yara/blob/master/athena.yara"
strings:
$cmd1 = "ddos." fullword
$cmd2 = "layer4." fullword
$cmd3 = "war." fullword
$cmd4 = "smartview" fullword
$cmd5 = "ftp.upload" fullword
$msg1 = "%s %s :%s LAYER4 Combo Flood: Stopped"
$msg2 = "%s %s :%s IRC War: Flood started [Type: %s | Target: %s]"
$msg3 = "%s %s :%s FTP Upload: Failed"
$msg4 = "Athena v2"
$msg5 = "%s %s :%s ECF Flood: Stopped [Total Connections: %ld | Rate: %ld Connections/Second]"
// v1 strs
$amsg1 = "ARME flood on %s/%s:%i for %i seconds [Host confirmed vulnerable"
$amsg2 = " Rapid HTTP Combo flood on %s:%i for %i seconds"
$amsg3 = "Began flood: %i connections every %i ms to %s:%i"
$amsg4 = "IPKiller>Athena"
$amsg5 = "Athena=Shit!"
$amsg6 = "Athena-v1"
$amsg7 = "BTC wallet.dat file found"
$amsg8 = "MineCraft lastlogin file found"
$amsg9 = "Process '%s' was found and scheduled for deletion upon next reboot"
$amsg10 = "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.503l3; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; MSOffice 12)"
// Athena-v1.8.3
$amsg11 = "Rapid Connect/Disconnect"
$amsg12 = "BTC wallet.dat found,"
// v1 cmds
$acmd1 = ":!arme"
$acmd2 = ":!openurl"
$acmd3 = ":!condis"
$acmd4 = ":!httpcombo"
$acmd5 = ":!urlblock"
$acmd6 = ":!udp"
$acmd7 = ":!btcwallet"
condition:
(all of ($cmd*) and 3 of ($msg*)) or (5 of ($amsg*) and 5 of ($acmd*))
}This YARA rule can be deployed in the following contexts:
This rule contains 29 string patterns in its detection logic.
Scenario: System update or patching using a tool like Ansible or Chef that temporarily uses IRC-like communication for configuration synchronization.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude traffic from known configuration management tools (e.g., ansible, chef, puppet) or IP ranges associated with internal DevOps infrastructure.
Scenario: Scheduled job execution using cron or systemd that connects to an internal IRC server for status updates or notifications.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude connections to internal IRC servers (e.g., irc.example.com) or traffic initiated by scheduled tasks (e.g., cron, systemd-timed).
Scenario: Admin task using Wireshark or tcpdump to capture and analyze network traffic, which may include IRC protocol packets during packet inspection.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude traffic originating from packet analysis tools (e.g., wireshark, tcpdump) or processes running under user accounts with elevated privileges for analysis.
Scenario: Internal monitoring tool like Prometheus or Grafana using a custom IRC-based alerting system for real-time notifications.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude traffic from monitoring tools (e.g., prometheus, grafana) or connections to internal alerting services (e.g., irc.alerts.example.com).
Scenario: Legacy application or script using the IRC protocol for internal communication (e.g., ircclient in Python) for inter-service messaging.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude connections from known legacy applications or scripts (e.g., ircclient, ircbot) or traffic to internal messaging services (e.g., irc.messaging.example.com).