The rule detects potential reconnaissance activity by adversaries leveraging the malwared.ru domain, which is associated with malicious infrastructure. SOC teams should proactively hunt for this behavior in Azure Sentinel to identify early-stage threats and prevent lateral movement or data exfiltration.
YARA Rule
rule KelihosHlux
{
meta:
author = "@malpush"
maltype = "KelihosHlux"
description = "http://malwared.ru"
date = "22/02/2014"
strings:
$KelihosHlux_HexString = {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}
condition:
$KelihosHlux_HexString
}
This YARA rule can be deployed in the following contexts:
This rule contains 1 string patterns in its detection logic.
Scenario: A system administrator is using Malwared.ru as a reference for malware analysis during incident response.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude traffic from known admin IP ranges or users with elevated privileges (e.g., user.name != "admin" or src_ip in 10.0.0.0/8).
Scenario: A scheduled job is configured to fetch threat intelligence from Malwared.ru as part of a security automation pipeline.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude requests made by known automation tools or scheduled tasks (e.g., process.name == "cron", process.name == "task scheduler").
Scenario: A security tool such as OSSEC or Snort is configured to query Malwared.ru for updated threat lists.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude traffic from known security tool IPs or processes (e.g., src_ip in 192.168.1.0/24, process.name == "ossec", process.name == "snort").
Scenario: A developer is using Malwared.ru as a research resource while analyzing malware behavior or writing detection rules.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude traffic from development environments or user accounts associated with research (e.g., user.name == "researcher", src_ip in 10.10.0.0/16).
Scenario: A system update or patching tool (e.g., WSUS, Ansible, or Chef) is configured to pull metadata from Malwared.ru as part of a compliance check.
Filter/Exclusion: Exclude traffic from known patching or configuration management tools (e.g., process.name == "wsus", `process.name ==