Pikabot gathers victim network information through commands such as ipconfig and ipconfig /all.4
tool
Pikabot S1145
- Type
- malware
- Platform
- Windows
- Created
- 12 July 2024
- Last modified
- 28 October 2024
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.
MITRE reference S1145
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
Some versions of Pikabot build the final PE payload in memory to avoid writing contents to disk on the executing machine.8
During the initial Pikabot command and control check-in, Pikabot will transmit collected system information encrypted using RC4.9
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
Standing S1145
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
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 6%
6th percentile · 94% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique2med
Detection coverage S1145
305 distinct rules cover the 21 techniques recorded for this tool. The 335 technique-to-rule mappings resolve to 305 distinct rules, because one rule can cover several techniques. 214 Sigma · 91 Splunk.
19 covered by at least one rule2 with no coverage305 distinct rules in total
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