Cardinal RAT can communicate over multiple C2 host and port combinations.2
tool
Cardinal RAT S0348
- Type
- malware
- Platform
- Windows
- Created
- 30 January 2019
- Last modified
- 11 April 2024
Cardinal RAT is a potentially low volume remote access trojan (RAT) observed since December 2015. Cardinal RAT is notable for its unique utilization of uncompiled C# source code and the Microsoft Windows built-in csc.exe compiler.[1]
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
MITRE reference S0348
Cardinal RAT contains watchdog functionality that periodically ensures HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\Load is set to point to its executable.3
Cardinal RAT and its watchdog component are compiled and executed after being delivered to victims as embedded, uncompiled source code.4
Cardinal RAT encodes many of its artifacts and is encrypted (AES-128) when downloaded.5
Cardinal RAT can collect the username from a victim machine.6
Cardinal RAT injects into a newly spawned process created from a native Windows executable.7
Standing S0348
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this tool 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
84th percentile · 84% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
89th percentile · 89% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many tactics spanned or fewer.
61% of the population shares a single value across only 22 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
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
76th percentile · 76% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many detection rules per technique or fewer.
Detection coverage S0348
850 distinct rules cover the 22 techniques recorded for this tool. The 883 technique-to-rule mappings resolve to 850 distinct rules, because one rule can cover several techniques. 556 Sigma · 294 Splunk.
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