Stage Capabilities: Upload Malware

Adversaries may upload malware to third-party or adversary controlled infrastructure to make it accessible during targeting. Malicious software can include payloads, droppers, post-compromise tools, backdoors, and a variety of other malicious content. Adversaries may upload malware to support their operations, such as making a payload available to a victim network to enable Ingress Tool Transfer by placing it on an Internet accessible web server.

Malware may be placed on infrastructure that was previously purchased/rented by the adversary (Acquire Infrastructure) or was otherwise compromised by them (Compromise Infrastructure). Malware can also be staged on web services, such as GitHub or Pastebin.[1]

Adversaries may upload backdoored files, such as application binaries, virtual machine images, or container images, to third-party software stores or repositories (ex: GitHub, CNET, AWS Community AMIs, Docker Hub). By chance encounter, victims may directly download/install these backdoored files via User Execution. Masquerading may increase the chance of users mistakenly executing these files.

ID: T1608.001
Sub-technique of:  T1608
Platforms: PRE
Contributors: Kobi Haimovich, CardinalOps
Version: 1.1
Created: 17 March 2021
Last Modified: 17 October 2021
Provided by LAYER 8

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G0050 APT32

APT32 has hosted malicious payloads in Dropbox, Amazon S3, and Google Drive for use during targeting.[1]

G0139 TeamTNT

TeamTNT has uploaded backdoored Docker images to Docker Hub.[2]

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1056 Pre-compromise

This technique cannot be easily mitigated with preventive controls since it is based on behaviors performed outside of the scope of enterprise defenses and controls.

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component
DS0035 Internet Scan Response Content

If infrastructure or patterns in malware have been previously identified, internet scanning may uncover when an adversary has staged malware to make it accessible for targeting.

Much of this activity will take place outside the visibility of the target organization, making detection of this behavior difficult. Detection efforts may be focused on post-compromise phases of the adversary lifecycle, such as User Execution or Ingress Tool Transfer.

References