ThreatFox: Vidar IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt targets the presence of Vidar malware indicators, which are commonly used by threat actors to deploy a remote access trojan for credential theft and persistent system control. Proactively hunting for these IOCs in Azure Sentinel allows the SOC to identify compromised endpoints early, preventing the malware from establishing a foothold and exfiltrating sensitive data before it can be leveraged for lateral movement or ransomware deployment.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: Vidar Total IOCs: 4 IOC Types: url, domain

KQL: Domain Hunt

// Hunt for DNS queries to known malicious domains
// Source: ThreatFox - Vidar
let malicious_domains = dynamic(["vpanel.v-panel.asia"]);
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 - Vidar
let malicious_urls = dynamic(["https://t.me/jj43w", "https://vpanel.v-panel.asia/", "https://gt.234-e.com"]);
UrlClickEvents
| where Url has_any (malicious_urls)
| project Timestamp, AccountUpn, Url, ActionType, IsClickedThrough
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

References

• ThreatFox — Vidar

False Positive Guidance

• Legacy Application Deployment via Group Policy: Administrators deploying a legacy Java-based line-of-business application (e.g., an old ERP client) may use gpmc.msc to push a GPO that executes a specific .jar or .exe installer from a shared network path. If the installer’s hash or path matches one of the Vidar IOCs (often generic paths like C:\Program Files\... or specific legacy hashes), this triggers the rule.

  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude events where the parent process is gpupdate.exe or gpedit.exe, or filter out execution paths under C:\Windows\Temp\ or C:\ProgramData\ that are initiated by gpupdate.exe within a 5-minute window.

• Scheduled Maintenance Jobs for Third-Party Backup Agents: Enterprise backup solutions (e.g., Veeam, Commvault, or Acronis) often install agent services that run periodic cleanup or verification tasks via Task Scheduler. If the agent’s binary is located in a non-standard directory (e.g., C:\Program Files (x86)\BackupAgent\bin\) and its hash matches a Vidar IOC, the scheduled task execution will trigger the detection.

  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude executions where the parent process is svchost.exe (specifically for the Task Scheduler service) or taskschd.msc, and the executable path contains known backup vendor names (e.g., veeam, commvault, acronis).

• Development Environment Testing with Sample Binaries: Developers in QA or DevOps teams may run sample executables or test harnesses from shared development drives (e.g., \\dev-share\tools\testbin\) to validate build artifacts. If a test binary is copied from a repository and executed locally, and its hash or path