Pikabot is a backdoor used for initial access and follow-on tool deployment active since early 2023. Pikabot is notable for extensive use of multiple encoding, encryption, and defense evasion mechanisms to evade defenses and avoid analysis. Pikabot has some overlaps with QakBot, but insufficient evidence exists to definitively link these two malware families. Pikabot is frequently used to deploy follow on tools such as Cobalt Strike or ransomware variants.[1][2][3]
21
TechniquesTop 18%
7
Tactics68th pct
1
Threat groupunranked
2
Campaignsunranked
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
Pikabot loads a set of PNG images stored in the malware's resources section (RCDATA), each with an encrypted section containing portions of the core Pikabot core module. These sections are loaded and decrypted using a bitwise XOR operation with a hardcoded 32 bit key.5
Pikabot further decrypts information embedded via steganography using AES-CBC with the same 32 bit key as initial XOR operations combined with the first 16 bytes of the encrypted data as an initialization vector.6 Other Pikabot variants include encrypted, chunked sections of the stage 2 payload in the initial loader .text section before decrypting and assembling these during execution.7
Pikabot, following payload decryption, creates a process hard-coded into the dropped (e.g., WerFault.exe) and injects the decrypted core modules into it.10
Privilege Escalation · Stealth2 detection rules
Standing S1145
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
Techniques21Top 18%
82nd percentile · 82% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics768th pct
68th percentile · 68% 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.
Campaigns285% 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 / technique5medBottom 7%
7th percentile · 93% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique3medBottom 16%
16th percentile · 84% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more atomic tests per technique.
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 21 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
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.
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. (...)
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. (...)
The following analytic detects potentially suspicious large volumes of data sent by the connection initiator on flows from internal to external networks. (...)
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 detects the use of `cmd.exe /c` to execute commands, a technique often employed by adversaries and malware to run batch commands or invoke other shells like PowerShell. (...)
The following analytic identifies the use of named-pipe impersonation for privilege escalation, commonly associated with Cobalt Strike and similar frameworks. (...)
Victor Sergeev, Daniil Yugoslavskiy, Gleb Sukhodolskiy, Timur Zinniatullin, oscd.community, Tim Shelton, frack113 (split)
2019-10-25
2025-10-22
cbf93e5d-ca6c-4722-8bea-e9119007c248
Splunk
The following analytic identifies specific GET or HEAD requests to web servers that indicate reconnaissance attempts to find vulnerable JBoss servers. (...)
The following analytic detects the creation of specific AzureHound-related files, such as `*-azurecollection.zip` and various `.json` files, on disk. (...)
The following analytic detects executions of cmd.exe spawned by processes that are commonly abused by attackers and do not typically launch cmd.exe. (...)
The following analytic detects the creation of files typically associated with SharpHound, a reconnaissance tool used for gathering domain and trust data. (...)
The following detects the execution of cscript.exe or wscript.exe processes spawned by cmd.exe, leveraging Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) telemetry mapped to the Endpoint data model, with additional contextual filtering to improve fidelity and reduce false positives. (...)