POWERSOURCE is a PowerShell backdoor that is a heavily obfuscated and modified version of the publicly available tool DNS_TXT_Pwnage. It was observed in February 2017 in spearphishing campaigns against personnel involved with United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings at various organizations. The malware was delivered when macros were enabled by the victim and a VBS script was dropped. [1][2]
6
Techniques29th pct
6
Tactics53rd pct
1
Threat groupunranked
0
CampaignsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
POWERSOURCE achieves persistence by setting a Registry Run key, with the path depending on whether the victim account has user or administrator access.9
If the victim is using PowerShell 3.0 or later, POWERSOURCE writes its decoded payload to an alternate data stream (ADS) named kernel32.dll that is saved in %PROGRAMDATA%\Windows\.10
Stealth29 detection rules
Standing S0145
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this malware touches. Coverage is how well defended each thing it does is, as a median per technique rather than a total — a total would just restate the reach. Each figure is ranked against all 825 ATT&CK software entries only where that population actually spreads. Where most of the population shares one value, a percentile would rank the tie instead of the entity, so the raw value is shown and no rank is claimed.
Reach
Techniques629th pct
29th percentile · 71% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more Enterprise techniques.
Tactics653rd pct
53rd percentile · 53% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many tactics spanned or fewer.
Threat group161% tie · 22 values
61% of the population shares a single value across only 22 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Campaigns085% tie · 8 values
85% of the population shares a single value across only 8 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique39.5medTop 14%
86th percentile · 86% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many detection rules per technique or fewer.
Tests / technique13.5med
POWERSOURCE detections S0145
543 distinct rules cover the 6 techniques recorded for this malware. 405 Sigma · 138 Splunk.
6 covered by at least one rule543 distinct rules in total
Showing 1-50 of 500+ rules
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Detects alternate PowerShell hosts potentially bypassing detections looking for powershell.exe
Detects when AppLocker "Audit only" enforcement mode reports that an Application, DLL, Script, MSI, or Packaged-App would have been blocked if AppLocker "Enforce rules" enforcement mode was enabled.
Detects the Linux-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency by Axios NPM package, including payload download via curl and detached execution using nohup and python3. (...)
Detects the macOS-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency in Axios NPM Package, including AppleScript execution via osascript, payload download, permission modification, execution, and cleanup.
This detection uses Windows security events to detect suspicious access attempts to the registry key values and sub-keys of Azure AD Health service agents (e.g AD FS). (...)
This analytic detects unexpected outbound network connections initiated by known webserver processes such as `httpd.exe`, `nginx.exe`, or `tomcat.exe` to common file sharing or public content hosting services like GitHub, Discord CDN, Transfer.sh, or Pastebin. (...)
The following analytic detects potential reverse shell activity by identifying connections involving ports commonly associated with remote access tools, shell listeners, or tunneling utilities. (...)
The following analytic detects connections with a high Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) threat confidence score, indicating potentially malicious behavior within encrypted traffic. (...)
This analytic identifies Snort intrusion signatures that have been triggered by ten or more distinct internal IP addresses within a one-hour window. (...)
The following analytic detects the execution of the curl utility where the command line includes percent-encoded characters and explicit file output options (such as -o or --output). (...)