ThreatFox: Venus Stealer IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt targets the presence of known Venus Stealer indicators to identify compromised endpoints where this infostealer is actively harvesting credentials, browser data, and cryptocurrency wallet information. Proactively hunting for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel allows the SOC to detect and isolate infected systems before the adversary exfiltrates sensitive data or establishes persistence, mitigating the high severity risk associated with this prevalent stealer malware.

IOC Summary

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

Type	Value	Threat Type	First Seen	Confidence
sha256_hash	`1ae9433efe8a190b2dc0b842050b67255d3c54b17097314f189d608c7a40d678`	payload	2026-09-19	95%
sha1_hash	`3d2e9031c415884cc67ef0fedf9d802981700f6b`	payload	2026-09-19	95%
md5_hash	`93e76e5b33860040d1a4235234a8e6c7`	payload	2026-09-19	95%
sha1_hash	`491f801f4d59380016d1b8ea5ff4baa097cdf84f`	payload	2026-09-19	95%
md5_hash	`0049d699536ec0a1a3242626edf840d3`	payload	2026-09-19	95%
sha256_hash	`574fe1d0b5b67b8a4a58ad76458cfa2d5d7c9061657abc4a672cd23e96bf4aeb`	payload	2026-09-19	95%

KQL: Hash Hunt

// Hunt for files matching known malicious hashes
// Source: ThreatFox - Venus Stealer
let malicious_hashes = dynamic(["1ae9433efe8a190b2dc0b842050b67255d3c54b17097314f189d608c7a40d678", "3d2e9031c415884cc67ef0fedf9d802981700f6b", "93e76e5b33860040d1a4235234a8e6c7", "491f801f4d59380016d1b8ea5ff4baa097cdf84f", "0049d699536ec0a1a3242626edf840d3", "574fe1d0b5b67b8a4a58ad76458cfa2d5d7c9061657abc4a672cd23e96bf4aeb"]);
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 — Venus Stealer

False Positive Guidance

Scenario: A DevOps engineer uses curl or wget to download a specific version of a library or tool from a GitHub repository that happens to be hosted on a domain currently listed in the ThreatFox Venus Stealer IOC set (e.g., a shared CDN or a compromised mirror site).
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the user agent string contains curl, Wget, or Git and the destination port is 443, provided the source IP is within the internal corporate network range.
Scenario: An IT administrator performs a manual backup or data transfer using rsync or scp to a staging server that is temporarily assigned an IP address matching one of the Venus Stealer C2 IPs (often seen in cloud environments where IPs are recycled).
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude connections where the protocol is SSH (port 22) or the process name is rsync/scp, and the source user is a member of the BackupAdmins or IT_Ops security group.
Scenario: A scheduled task for log aggregation or telemetry collection (e.g., Splunk Universal Forwarder or Datadog Agent) initiates a periodic heartbeat to a collector endpoint that coincidentally matches a known Venus Stealer IP due to infrastructure changes or shared hosting.
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the process name matches known telemetry agents (splunkd.exe, datadog-agent.exe, logstash.exe) and the connection frequency is consistent with the configured reporting interval (e.g., every 60 seconds).
Scenario: A developer runs a local testing environment or containerized application (e.g., Docker or Kubernetes pod) that uses a mock server or test endpoint hosted on a public IP listed in the IOC set for integration testing purposes.