ThreatFox: SmartApeSG IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This detection rule identifies adversary activity by monitoring network and endpoint telemetry for specific indicators of compromise (IOCs) linked to the SmartApeSG threat actor. Proactive hunting in Azure Sentinel is critical because early identification of these IOCs enables rapid containment of potential lateral movement or data exfiltration before they escalate into a broader incident.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: SmartApeSG Total IOCs: 3 IOC Types: url, domain

KQL: Domain Hunt

// Hunt for DNS queries to known malicious domains
// Source: ThreatFox - SmartApeSG
let malicious_domains = dynamic(["sagearcade.top"]);
DnsEvents
| where Name has_any (malicious_domains)
| project TimeGenerated, Computer, Name, IPAddresses, QueryType
| order by TimeGenerated desc

KQL: Url Hunt

// Hunt for access to known malicious URLs
// Source: ThreatFox - SmartApeSG
let malicious_urls = dynamic(["https://sagearcade.top/alias/signup-stylesheet", "https://sagearcade.top/alias/proxy-worker.js"]);
UrlClickEvents
| where Url has_any (malicious_urls)
| project Timestamp, AccountUpn, Url, ActionType, IsClickedThrough
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

References

• ThreatFox — SmartApeSG

False Positive Guidance

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

• Scenario: The Enterprise Security Operations Center (SOC) manually ingests a batch of new threat intelligence feeds into the Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP), which includes the SmartApeSG profile. During this ingestion, the TIP automatically pushes the associated 3 IOCs to the SIEM for correlation, triggering an alert even though no actual network traffic or endpoint event has occurred yet.

  • Suggested Filter: Exclude alerts where the source_type is “TIP_Ingestion” and the event_time falls within the scheduled maintenance window (e.g., 02:00–04:00 UTC) when feed updates are processed by tools like Anchore or MISP.

• Scenario: A DevOps engineer runs a periodic security scan using Tenable Nessus against the corporate web server cluster. The scanner’s vulnerability database includes SmartApeSG signatures, causing it to generate log entries matching the rule’s IOCs as part of a routine compliance check rather than an active threat detection.

  • Suggested Filter: Suppress alerts originating from the source_host range assigned to internal scanning appliances (e.g., 10.20.50.x) where the process_name is “NessusScanner” or “TenableOneAgent”.

• Scenario: The IT Operations team executes a scheduled PowerShell job via Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to deploy a new security policy update across all domain-joined workstations. This deployment script references the SmartApeSG IOC list as part of its validation logic, generating detection events that mimic real-time threat activity.

  • Suggested Filter: Create an exclusion rule for events where the user_account is “SCCM