DLL side-loading | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The open-source remote access trojan known as  Quasar RAT  has been observed leveraging DLL side-loading to fly under the radar and stealthily siphon data from compromised Windows hosts. "This technique capitalizes on the inherent trust these files command within the Windows environment," Uptycs researchers Tejaswini Sandapolla and Karthickkumar Kathiresan  said  in a report published last week, detailing the malware's reliance on ctfmon.exe and calc.exe as part of the attack chain. Also known by the names CinaRAT or Yggdrasil, Quasar RAT is a C#-based remote administration tool capable of gathering system information, a list of running applications, files, keystrokes, screenshots, and executing arbitrary shell commands. DLL side-loading  is a  popular   technique  adopted by  many threat actors  to execute their own payloads by planting a spoofed DLL file with a name that a benign executable is known to be looking for. "Adversarie...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as  Dragon Breath  has been observed adding new layers of complexity to its attacks by adopting a novel  DLL side-loading  mechanism. "The attack is based on a classic side-loading attack, consisting of a clean application, a malicious loader, and an encrypted payload, with various modifications made to these components over time," Sophos researcher Gabor Szappanos  said . "The latest campaigns add a twist in which a first-stage clean application 'side'-loads a second clean application and auto-executes it. The second clean application side-loads the malicious loader DLL. After that, the malicious loader DLL executes the final payload." Operation Dragon Breath, also tracked under the names APT-Q-27 and Golden Eye, was  first   documented  by QiAnXin in 2020, detailing a watering hole campaign designed to trick users into downloading a trojanized Windows installer for Telegram. A  subsequen...