FinFisher is a government-grade commercial surveillance spyware reportedly sold exclusively to government agencies for use in targeted and lawful criminal investigations. It is heavily obfuscated and uses multiple anti-analysis techniques. It has other variants including Wingbird. [1][2][3][4][5]
22
TechniquesTop 16%
8
TacticsTop 20%
1
Threat groupunranked
0
CampaignsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
FinFisher is heavily obfuscated in many ways, including through the use of spaghetti code in its functions in an effort to confuse disassembly programs. It also uses a custom XOR algorithm to obfuscate code.89
FinFisher injects itself into various processes depending on whether it is low integrity or high integrity.1617
Privilege Escalation · Stealth12 detection rules
Standing S0182
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
Techniques22Top 16%
84th percentile · 84% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics8Top 20%
80th percentile · 80% 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 / technique15med34th pct
34th percentile · 66% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique6.5med56th pct
56th percentile · 56% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many atomic tests per technique or fewer.
Data comps / technique4med54% tie · 11 values
54% of the population shares a single value across only 11 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Mitigations / technique1med57th pct
57th percentile · 57% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many mitigations per technique or fewer.
5 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this malware’s 22 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
The following analytic detects the execution of tools commonly exploited by cybercriminals, such as those used for unauthorized access, network scanning, privilege escalation, password dumping or data exfiltration. (...)
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). (...)
The following analytic detects the use of CertUtil.exe with the 'decode' argument, which may indicate an attempt to decode a previously encoded file, potentially containing malicious payloads. (...)
This analytic detects potential reconnaissance activities on Cisco ASA devices by identifying execution of multiple information-gathering "show" commands within a short timeframe. (...)
This analytic identifies Snort intrusion signatures that have been triggered by ten or more distinct internal IP addresses within a one-hour window. (...)
Victor Sergeev, Daniil Yugoslavskiy, Gleb Sukhodolskiy, Timur Zinniatullin, oscd.community, Tim Shelton, frack113 (split)
2019-10-25
2025-10-22
9df5f547-c86a-433e-b533-f2794357e242
Splunk
The following analytic identifies the use of named-pipe impersonation for privilege escalation, commonly associated with Cobalt Strike and similar frameworks. (...)
Detects creation of specific system DLL files that are usually not present on the system (or at least not in system directories) but may be loaded by legitimate processes. (...)
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). (...)