ThreatFox: DCRat IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hypothesis targets the presence of DCRat, a remote access trojan that grants adversaries persistent command-and-control capabilities to execute arbitrary commands and exfiltrate sensitive data. Proactively hunting for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel is critical to identify compromised endpoints before the malware can establish a foothold, escalate privileges, or facilitate lateral movement across the network.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: DCRat Total IOCs: 3 IOC Types: ip:port

KQL: Ip Hunt

// Hunt for network connections to known malicious IPs
// Source: ThreatFox - DCRat
let malicious_ips = dynamic(["193.143.1.247", "46.246.84.6", "41.68.226.249"]);
CommonSecurityLog
| where DestinationIP in (malicious_ips) or SourceIP in (malicious_ips)
| project TimeGenerated, SourceIP, DestinationIP, DestinationPort, DeviceAction, Activity
| order by TimeGenerated desc

KQL: Ip Hunt Device

// Hunt in Defender for Endpoint network events
let malicious_ips = dynamic(["193.143.1.247", "46.246.84.6", "41.68.226.249"]);
DeviceNetworkEvents
| where RemoteIP in (malicious_ips)
| project Timestamp, DeviceName, RemoteIP, RemotePort, InitiatingProcessFileName, ActionType
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

References

• ThreatFox — DCRat

False Positive Guidance

• Scenario: A DevOps engineer uses a custom PowerShell script to deploy configuration files to a fleet of servers, where the script downloads a specific binary from an internal artifact repository (e.g., Artifactory or Nexus) that happens to match a known DCRat hash or URL pattern due to a shared build pipeline or legacy naming convention.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the source IP is within the internal CI/CD subnet range (e.g., 10.20.0.0/16) and the destination URL contains the internal artifact domain (e.g., *.artifacts.internal.corp).
• Scenario: An IT administrator performs a manual patch deployment using a tool like PDQ Deploy or SCCM, which temporarily downloads a specific executable from a public CDN or vendor update server that is also listed in the DCRat IOC list as a known download point for the RAT payload.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the process name is a known deployment tool (e.g., pdqdeploy.exe, ccmexec.exe) and the parent process is a service account or admin session, specifically filtering out URLs that match the vendor’s official update domain (e.g., *.microsoft.com, *.pdq.com).
• Scenario: A security team conducts a red team exercise or a vulnerability scan using a tool like Nmap or Metasploit, which leverages a common RDP or SMB exploit payload that shares a similar binary hash or network beacon pattern with DCRat, triggering the IOC match during the scan.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the source host is tagged in CMDB as “Red Team” or “Scanner” and the time window aligns with the scheduled maintenance or testing window (e.g., 02:00-04:00 UTC on weekends).