COATHANGER is a remote access tool (RAT) targeting FortiGate networking appliances. First used in 2023 in targeted intrusions against military and government entities in the Netherlands along with other victims, COATHANGER was disclosed in early 2024, with a high confidence assessment linking this malware to a state-sponsored entity in the People's Republic of China. COATHANGER is delivered after gaining access to a FortiGate device, with in-the-wild observations linked to exploitation of CVE-2022-42475. The name COATHANGER is based on a unique string in the malware used to encrypt configuration files on disk: “She took his coat and hung it up”.[1]
18
TechniquesTop 25%
8
TacticsTop 20%
0
Threat groupsNone recorded
0
CampaignsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
COATHANGER includes a binary labeled authd that can inject a library into a running process and then hook an existing function within that process with a new function from that library.5
COATHANGER provides a BusyBox reverse shell for command and control.7
Execution31 detection rules
Standing S1105
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
Techniques18Top 25%
75th percentile · 75% 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 groups061% 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 / technique12.5medBottom 23%
23rd percentile · 77% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique7med62nd pct
62nd percentile · 62% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many atomic tests per technique or fewer.
Data comps / technique5med54% 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 / technique2medTop 9%
91st percentile · 91% 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 18 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
669 distinct rules cover the 18 techniques recorded for this malware. 446 Sigma · 223 Splunk.
18 covered by at least one rule669 distinct rules in total
Showing 1-50 of 600+ rules
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Splunk
The following analytic identifies access to the /api/v1/configuration/users/user-roles/user-role/rest-userrole1/web/web-bookmarks/bookmark endpoint, which is associated with CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887 vulnerabilities. (...)
The following analytic detects potential exploitation of the Adobe ColdFusion vulnerability, CVE-2023-26360, which allows unauthenticated arbitrary file read. (...)
Tobias Michalski (Nextron Systems), Max Altgelt (Nextron Systems)
2021-09-20
2023-01-02
6702b13c-e421-44cc-ab33-42cc25570f11
Detects the suspicious file that is created from PoC code against Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-34527 (PrinterNightmare), CVE-2021-1675 .
This search surfaces AWS Bedrock Claude prompts containing phrases commonly associated with prompt injection or jailbreak attempts, such as instruction overrides, persona switching, or requests to ignore prior guidance. (...)
This detection identifies sensitive data such as social security numbers, passwords, API keys, and credit card numbers being sent in prompts to AWS Bedrock Claude models. (...)
This detection identifies unusually large prompts sent to AWS Bedrock Claude models by calculating the statistical baseline of input token counts and flagging requests that exceed one standard deviations above the mean. (...)
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.
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. (...)
Adversaries may communicate using application layer protocols associated with web traffic to avoid detection/network filtering by blending in with existing traffic. (...)
This analytic detects the usage of the Utility osascript on a macOS device initiated a network connection lasting longer than 10 minutes (600 seconds). (...)
This analytic detects system binaries that are commonly abused in process injection techniques but are observed without any command-line arguments. (...)