Bangat Identifying Strings

Hunt Hypothesis

The detection rule identifies potential adversary activity by flagging suspicious strings that may be used for command and control or data exfiltration. SOC teams should proactively hunt for these strings in Azure Sentinel to uncover early-stage threats that may evade traditional detection methods.

YARA Rule

rule BangatStrings
{
    
    meta:
        description = "Bangat Identifying Strings"
        author = "Seth Hardy"
        last_modified = "2014-07-10"
        
    strings:
        $lib1 = "DreatePipe"
        $lib2 = "HetSystemDirectoryA"
        $lib3 = "SeleaseMutex"
        $lib4 = "DloseWindowStation"
        $lib5 = "DontrolService"
        $file = "~hhC2F~.tmp"
        $mc = "~_MC_3~"

    condition:
       all of ($lib*) or $file or $mc
}

Deployment Notes

This YARA rule can be deployed in the following contexts:

• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — Custom indicators / advanced hunting
• Email Gateway — Attachment scanning
• File Share Monitoring — Periodic scanning of shared drives
• YARA CLI — Manual threat hunting on endpoints

This rule contains 7 string patterns in its detection logic.

• Source Rule

False Positive Guidance

• Scenario: A system administrator is using grep to search for specific strings in log files during a routine troubleshooting session.
  Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes where the command line includes grep or awk used for log analysis, or filter by user ID (e.g., user_id = "root" or user_id = "admin").

• Scenario: A scheduled job runs rsync to synchronize files between servers, and the string being transferred matches the detection pattern.
  Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes related to rsync or scp, or filter by process name using process.name = "rsync" or process.name = "scp".

• Scenario: A developer is using curl or wget to fetch a script from a remote server that contains the string as part of a legitimate API response.
  Filter/Exclusion: Exclude network requests where the destination is a known internal or external API endpoint, or filter by HTTP method (e.g., http.method = "GET" and http.url contains "api.example.com").

• Scenario: A database administrator is running a query using psql or mysql that includes the string as part of a SQL statement.
  Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes related to database tools like psql or mysql, or filter by process name using process.name = "psql" or process.name = "mysql".

• Scenario: A DevOps engineer is using ansible to execute a playbook that includes a string matching the detection pattern as part of a configuration task.
  Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes related to ansible or filter by process name using process.name = "ansible", or check for the presence of ansible in the command line.