Microsoft’s Defender ATP Research Team yesterday revealed its discovery of a late-spring, fileless malware campaign that used "living-off-the-land" techniques to infected victims with information-stealing Astaroth backdoor.

The attackers behind this particular campaign abused a multiple of legitimate services in order to deliver the final payload, including the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line tool (WMIC), the BITSAdmin command-line tool, the Certutil Certificate Services command-tool, the Regsvr32 command-line utility and the Userinit system tool.

"It's interesting to note that at no point during the attack chain is any file run that's not a system tool," remarked Andrew, Lelli, a member of the Defender ATP Research Team, in a company blog post. "In other words they [the attackers] use fileless techniques to silently install the malware on target devices."

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Topics:

Cybercrime Malware Phishing