• Dark Utilities, released in early 2022, is a platform that provides full-featured C2 capabilities to adversaries.
• It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems.
• Payloads provided by the platform support Windows, Linux and
• Python-based implementations and are hosted within the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), making them resilient to content moderation or law enforcement intervention.
• Since its initial release, we've observed malware samples in the wild leveraging it to facilitate remote access and cryptocurrency mining.

• Cisco Talos recently discovered a new attack framework called "Manjusaka" being used in the wild that has the potential to become prevalent across the threat landscape. This framework is advertised as an imitation of the Cobalt Strike framework.
• The implants for the new malware family are written in the Rust language for Windows and Linux.
• A fully functional version of the command and control (C2), written in GoLang with a User Interface in Simplified Chinese, is freely available and can generate new implants with custom configurations with ease, increasing the likelihood of wider adoption of this framework by malicious actors.
• We recently discovered a campaign in the wild using lure documents themed around COVID-19 and the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province. These maldocs ultimately led to the delivery of Cobalt Strike beacons on infected endpoints.
• We have observed the same threat actor using the Cobalt Strike beacon and implants from the Manjusaka framework.

Unit 42 continuously hunts for new and unique malware samples that match known advanced persistent threat (APT) patterns and tactics. On May 19, one such sample was uploaded to VirusTotal, where it received a benign verdict from all 56 vendors that evaluated it. Beyond the obvious detection concerns, we believe this sample is also significant in terms of its malicious payload, command and control (C2), and packaging.

We discovered that Gimmick MacOS malware communicates only through their C2 server hosted on Google Drive. The malware was discovered in the first week of May and it has been actively targeting macOS devices

During our analysis of the Penquin-related infrastructure we reported in our previous post, we paid special attention to the malicious binaries contacting these IP addresses, since as we showed in the analysis, they had been used as C2 of other threats used by Turla.